A People's Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years' War 0807845760, 9780807845769

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A People's Army

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Fred Anderson

A People's Army Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years' War

Published for The Institute of Early American History and Culture Williamsburg, Virginia By The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill and London

The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture is sponsored jointly by The College of William and Mary and The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. This book was the winner of the Jamestown Manuscript Prize for 1982. ©1984 The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Anderson, Fred, 1949— A people's army. Includes index. I. Massachusetts—History—French and Indian War, 1755-1763. Z.Massachusetts— Militia—History—i8th century. 3. Soldiers— Massachusetts—History—:8th century. I. Institute of Early American History and Culture (Williamsburg,Va.) II. Title. EI99.A58 1984 973.2'6 84-2344 ISBN 978-0-8078-1611-0 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8078-4576-9 (pbk.: alk. paper) Portions of chapters 2 and 6 appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XXXVIII (1981), 395-4i73 and XL (1983), 499-527. II

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9 8 7 6 5

T H I S BOOK WAS DIGITALLY P R I N T E D .

To my mother and to the memory of my father

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Contents

Preface

vii

List of Illustrations

XV

List of Tables

xvii

Part I: The Contexts of War

i

I. War and the Bay Colony: An Overview

3

2. "Sons of Some of the Best Yeomen in New England": Army and Society in Provincial Massachusetts

26

Part II: The Experience of War

63

3. "Hard Service and Poor Keeping": Everyday Life in the Provincial Army

65

4. "There Is No Spare Here of the Whip": Interactions between Provincial and Regular Troops

in

5. "As Mournful an Hour as Ever I Saw": Battle and Its Effects

142

Part III: The Meaning of War

165

6. "A Principle So Strongly Imbibed": Contractual Principles and the Provincial Conception of Military Service

167

7. "Victory Undoubtedly Comes from the Lord": Providentialism and the New Englanders' Understanding of Warfare

196

Appendix A. Tables: Massachusetts Provincial Forces during the Seven Years' War

225

Appendix B. Diaries and Orderly Books

243

Appendix C. Provincial Troop Disorders, 1755-1759

251

Appendix D. Provincial Sermons, 1755-1762

254

Index

263

Preface

This book examines the experiences of New England provincial soldiers in the last and greatest of America's colonial wars. It thus partakes of two historical genres, one of which is comparatively new, while the other is the oldest of all. But even as it shares certain characteristics with both, it differs from each in important ways. Because I have chosen to investigate the lives of large numbers of ordinary men engaged in a commonplace pursuit, and because in some measure I have approached the task through quantification, this book can be considered a work of social history. It differs from much recent social history, however, in that it concerns not the longue duree, but the impact of an event, the Seven Years' War, in the lives of the people it affected most directly. Given a sufficiently olympian approach to social history, it would be possible to interpret the war as a brief perturbation in the long run of colonial New England's agrarian stability. To treat it thus, however, would be to misconstrue the war as a social phenomenon. Understood in terms of personal experience and taken as a proportion of the lifetimes of the people it touched, the Seven Years' War was anything but a deviation from business as usual. It was instead a world-shaping event, an occurrence with the power to unify the experiences of those across whose lives it cut. The Seven Years' War, like World War I, was capable of creating a generation of men with a "common frame of reference" that set them apart from those who had preceded them in time, and which would "later distinguish the members of the generation from those who follow[ed] them," as Robert Wohl has written in The Generation of 1914 ([Cambridge, Mass., 1979], 210). The men of the "generation of 1914" whom Wohl examined, of course, were members of a comparatively tiny, highly self-conscious, highly literate elite, and thus quite unlike the farmers, laborers, and artisans who made up the provincial armies of New England in the Seven Years' War. Yet Wohl's insight into what makes a generation may be applied as fittingly to the eighteenth century as to the twentieth: A historical generation is not defined by its chronological limits or its borders. It is not a zone of dates; nor is it an army of contemporaries making its way across a territory of time. It is more like a magnetic field at the center of which lies an experience or a series of experiences. It is a system of references and identifications that gives pri-

viii Preface ority to some kinds of experiences and devalues others—hence it is relatively independent of age. The chronological center of this experiential field need not be stable; it may shift with time. What is essential to the formation of a generational consciousness is some common frame of reference. . . . This frame of reference is always derived from great historical events like wars, revolutions, plagues, famines, and economic crises, because it is great historical events like these that supply the markers and signposts with which people impose order on their past and link their individual fates with those of the communities in which they live. [P. 210] Because the story I have chosen to tell centers on war and military service, this book is also a work of military history. I have, however, avoided the classic approaches of military historians: the narration of campaigns and the analysis of generalship. Anyone who is looking here for a traditional military account should look instead to the works of its masters— especially to Francis Parkman's incomparable Montcalm and Wolfe and to the life's work of Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution. Instead of concentrating on campaigns and battles, I have focused on the mundane aspects of soldiering—daily life, discipline, common attitudes to war, and so on—in order to gauge the effects of military service on the provincial troops themselves. This approach, in turn, has led me to conceive an objection to traditional military history, which I will now register. Wars are waged to be won, and too many writers of military history have taken it as their main task to isolate the elements that have made for success or failure, trying (for example) to explain how General A could fight a battle brilliantly against great odds while General B could manage to dissipate his advantages and butcher his own men. This attention to winning and losing is understandable, but it has led military historians to judge past armies and soldiers by professional standards of discipline, efficiency, and cohesion. The dangers of ahistoricism in such judgments are clear enough, but have been too often overlooked. Professional military ideals have not always and everywhere been determining factors, or even significant ones, in motivating the men who made up the army or fought the war in question. In the pages that follow, I will argue that the New England provincials of the Seven Years' War subscribed to notions about military service and warfare that were wholly incompatible with the professional ideals and assumptions of their British regular army allies. Judged by timeless standards of military professionalism, the provincials seem merely to be what the British said they were: bad soldiers. Examined in light of their own ideas about what it meant to serve in an army or to fight a war, however, the provincials' apparently unsoldierly conduct can be seen to

Preface ix have been highly consistent, and indeed highly principled. To judge the provincials only as deficient versions of professional troops, without, reference to the provincials' shared values and their beliefs concerning war and military service, would be to misunderstand the actions and motivations of eighteenth-century New Englanders at war. And war, as much as peace, typified New England life in the eighteenth century. This, then, is the soldiers' story. It is divided into three parts. The first section concerns the contexts of military service. Chapter i sketches the chronology of the struggle for the North American continent as viewed from Massachusetts and then frames the argument of the book as a whole. Chapter 2 addresses the social context of military service in New England and investigates the composition of provincial armies. Among other things, this section suggests that the way in which provincial armed forces were recruited strongly influenced their performance in the field, and that while the structure of provincial armies was superficially similar to the model of a professional army, their functioning depended on factors entirely uncomprehended in their formal organization. The second section describes the physical realities of military life, examining the nature and effects of diet, shelter, disease, discipline, work, and combat. It traces the outlines of a harsh expedience, radically unlike anything in the civilian lives of the soldiers—an experience capable of creating a unique frame of reference for the men who shared it. The third section explicates the terms in which the provincials understood military service and warfare. As I have suggested, their understanding of these concepts was virtually incomprehensible to their superiors, the British regular officers; yet it was an understanding deeply rooted in the New England provincial culture in which the soldiers, enlisted men and officers alike, were raised. This book is based in large part on the writings of the provincial soldiers themselves, which survive in a surprisingly large body of diaries, letters, orderly books, memoirs, and miscellaneous documents. These sources communicate the experiences of the soldiers with great vividness, but also with considerable inexactitude in grammar, punctuation, and spelling. The following excerpt from an orderly book and journal kept by Sergeant Samuel Merriman of Deerfield in 1759 demonstrates the difficulties of interpretation introduced by the informality of punctuation and phonetic spelling: General orders—it is vary Nitoriously tru that profane cosing & swaring praules in ye campt; it is vary far from ye cristian solgers Deuty; it is not only vary Displasing to God armeyes, but dishonorable before men. it is theire fore Required & it will be expected that

x Preface for ye futer ye odus sound of cosing & swaring is to be turned in to a prefoun silence, ifter ye publish of these orders if any is found gilty of Bracking after these orders, theay may expect to suffer punishment, & all former orders to be observed. [4 July 1759; quoted in George Sheldon, A History of Deerfield, Massachusetts (Deerfield, Mass., 1895-1896; reprint, Somersworth, N.H., 1972), I, 663] While such passages, particularly in small doses, have considerable charm, they can also become stumbling blocks for the reader. Accordingly, I have modernized all quotations from soldiers' writings, following the method outlined by Samuel Eliot Morison in The Harvard Guide to American History ([Cambridge, Mass., 1974], 31-33). In doing so I have followed modern orthography and spelling, expanded abbreviations, and repunctuated to bring out the sense of the passage. I have not altered the words themselves, except where necessary to convey the sense of a garbled text, and in such cases I have enclosed my insertions in editorial brackets. Thus the order quoted above, if it were to appear in the text, would read as follows: General orders. It is very notoriously true that profane cursing and swearing prevails in the camp. It is very far from the Christian soldier's duty; it is not only very displeasing to [the] God [of] armies, but dishonorable before men. It is therefore required, and it will be expected, that for the future the odious sound of cursing and swearing will be turned into a profound silence. After the publishing] of these orders if any is found guilty of breaking . . . these orders, they may expect to suffer punishment. And all former orders to be observed. Clearly, such modernized transcriptions contain judgments that in the best of all possible worlds would be left up to the reader. In this passage, for example, I have intentionally rendered "cosing" as "cursing," even though Sergeant Merriman undoubtedly pronounced the word as "cussing." By transcribing the word hi its formally accepted spelling rather than its dialect form, I have inevitably deprived the reader of experiencing something of Merriman's pungent New England speech. But the modernized version preserves his meaning without introducing notions of quaintness, and all the condescension that quaintness implies. In making such decisions I have been guided by the presumption that the lack of articulate writing in no way indicates the absence of coherent thought; and since provincial troops were indeed shrewd observers of their world, it has seemed to me only just that their observations should be presented in a form that does credit to their shrewdness. Sergeant Merriman's orderly book points up another issue, as well: the nature of the texts on which I have drawn. So far as I have been able to

Preface xi learn, Merriman's journal is no longer accessible in manuscript, and I perforce have relied on George Sheldon's scrupulosity as a copyist, even though I have only a general sense of the editorial methods he employed. As a rule, I have consulted the manuscript versions of printed diaries and orderly books insofar as possible, and have checked quoted passages in detail when I was in doubt about the reliability of a printed version. Unfortunately, the manuscripts have not always been available; thus in cases where passages of doubtful accuracy could not be verified, I have refrained from direct quotation. Finally, this book is based on a doctoral thesis with extensive annotation. I have occasionally made reference to much lengthier notes in that dissertation, "War and the Bay Colony: Soldiers and Society in Provincial Massachusetts during the Seven Years' War, 1754-1763" (1981), which may be consulted in the Harvard University Archives, Pusey Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts. A number of institutions and more than a score of people have had a hand in this project, either as a dissertation or as a book. The United States Army Center of Military History provided a yearlong fellowship that allowed me to make my first sustained push toward the completion of the thesis. Harvard University offered support in the form of a summer grant, funds for computer use, and the Artemas Ward Dissertation Fellowship. The staffs of several archives and libraries were of assistance, but those of the William L. Clements Library, in Ann Arbor, Michigan; the Henry E. Huntington Library, in San Marino, California; the Massachusetts Historical Society, in Boston; and the American Antiquarian Society, in Worcester, Massachusetts, were especially helpful. Scholars and friends at a variety of schools have offered encouragement, advice, and criticism. Steven Botein of Michigan State University, Nathan Hatch of the University of Notre Dame, Sung Bok Kim of the State University of New York at Albany, John Murrin of Princeton University, and John and Arlene Shy of the University of Michigan have all helped me to define, sharpen, and develop the project. Fellow graduate students and other friends contributed greatly to the progress of the thesis; in particular I must recognize Kent Coit, Eugenia Delamotte, Barbara DeWolfe, Walter Jackson, William Kelly, Patricia Denault, Kenneth Sokoloff, Helena Wall, and Jonathan Zorn for their help and support. During the writing of the dissertation and after its completion, David Jaffee offered particularly helpful commentary and energetic encouragement. I must also single out two special friends: both Randy Fertel, now of Le Moyne College, and Jon Roberts, of Harvard University, gave freely of their time and critical energy when they were heavily taxed by academic obligations and the de-

xii Preface mands of new fatherhood. And although both would disclaim it, William Griswold and Arthur Worrall must be recognized as my oldest and, in many ways, my greatest intellectual creditors. Without the stimulation of their teaching at Colorado State University in the late 19605 I would never have tried to become a historian; thanks largely to their continued encouragement and to the examples of their personal integrity and professional dedication, I am still.trying. More even than most colonialists, I am indebted to the Institute of Early American History and Culture. The Jamestown Prize Committee has, of course, a special place in my long list of benefactors. The portions of this book that first appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly are much the better for the scrupulous attention they received from Michael McGiffert. Douglas Edward Leach and Pauline Maier took time out from busy schedules to read a draft with care and to make perceptive, helpful suggestions for revision. Norman Fiering, Gil Kelly, and Daniel Vickers provided commentary and useful advice. Most of all, the Acting Editor of Publications for the Institute in 1982-1983, Thomas Doerflinger, deserves thanks: he was the book's faithful and sharp-eyed shepherd, and for his care and intelligence I am deeply grateful. Finally, my three advisors remain to be recognized: one appointed by Harvard to the task, one by friendship, and one by marriage. Without Bernard Bailyn's acute criticism and steady support, the dissertation would never have assumed the form it did; without the strenuous example that his own scholarship has set, I know that I would have tried less hard to do my best. To Christopher Jedrey I owe more than I can easily say, for a decade and more of intellectual companionship, discerning criticism, and friendship. While I cannot hope to repay that debt, I take special pleasure in being able to acknowledge it publicly, at last. But of all my many creditors, Virginia Dejohn Anderson has given the most to this project as its principal critic, helper, and dauntless supporter; and the most to me, as my life's partner. I have dedicated this book to my mother and to the memory of my father; but my mother well knows (as my father would have understood) that it is no derogation of their place to conclude that, like its author, this work is also Virginia's—more than she knows.

Illustrations

Maps Massachusetts and Its Principal Theaters of Military Activity in the Seven Years' War

4

Massachusetts and the New York Theater of Operations, circa 1759

15

The Campaign against Montreal, 1760

20

Figures Figure i. Occupational Distribution, by Rank, of Provincial Forces, 1756

56

Figure 2. Layout of a Regular Battalion Area

9i

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Tables

i. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. n. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31 .

Wages and Bounties of Private Soldiers Regiments of 1756, with Unit Strengths Rank Composition, 1756 Careers of Captains Serving in 1756 Careers of Field Officers Promotions of Field Officers, by Average Length of Service and Rank Number of Promotions of Field Officers, by Length of Service Conditions of Service, 1756 Profile of Provincial Soldiers, 1756 Age Distribution of Provincial Troops, 1756 Residence at Enlistment by Colony, 1756 Residence at Enlistment by Massachusetts County, 1756 Birthplace by Province or Region, 1756 Birthplace of Massachusetts Natives, by County, 1756 Birthplace of Nonnatives of Massachusetts, 1756 Persistence in Region of Birth of Massachusetts Natives, by Occupation, 1756 Levels of Movement Prior to Enlistment, by Cohort, 1756 Levels of Movement Prior to Enlistment, by Average Age, 1756 Occupational Distribution, Massachusetts Natives and British Immigrants, 1756 Occupational Distribution among Artisans, by Trade, Massachusetts Natives and British Immigrants, 1756 Occupational Distribution, by Rank, 1756 Average Age of Principal Ranks, 1756 Mean Age of Various Ranks, by Occupation, 1756 Levels of Movement at Enlistment, by Rank, 1756 Residential Composition of Regiments, 1756 Overall Physical Condition of Troops, 1756 Physical Condition of Troops, by Rank, 1756 Crude Death Rate, by Rank, 1756 Physical Condition of Troops, by Age Cohort, 1756 Crude Death Rate, by Age Cohort, 1756 Composition of General Courts-Martial in Amherst's Expeditionary Force, 1759

225 226 226 227 228 228 229 229 230 231 231 232 232 233 234 235 235 236 236 236 237 237 238 238 239 239 240 240 241 241 242

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Chapter i * War and the Bay Colony An Overview

In 1754 the people of Massachusetts Bay embarked on what would prove to be the final stage of their epic struggle with the French and Indians of Canada. Armed conflict with the papists had been going on longer than most Bay colonists could remember. Four successive spasms of violence, named in honor of three monarchs and a royal governor, had dominated public affairs in the province since the late seventeenth century. First in King William's War (1689-1697), then in Queen Anne's (1702-1713), Governor Dummer's (1722-1725), and King George's wars (1744-1748), the Bay Colony had contributed its share and more of blood and treasure to Great Britain's worldwide contest with France.1 None of the previous conflicts, however, had foreshadowed the toll that this climactic confrontation, the Seven Years' War, would exact from Massachusetts.2 Before the Seven Years' War was over, it would draw a third or more of the colony's service-eligible men into provincial armies and employ additional thousands in tasks directly related to the military effort. It would drive taxes to the highest levels in the history of the province, create a massive public debt, and bring the government on one occasion to the brink of bankruptcy. The war would also cause a massive influx of British specie and credit, temporarily expanding Massachusetts' hard-money economy. It 1. With the exception of Governor Dummer's War, these were all American phases of European conflicts: the War of the League of Augsburg (1689-1697), the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1713), and the War of Jenkins' Ear/the War of the Austrian Succession (1739-1748). 2. "The Seven Years' War," alas, is a convenient rather than an accurate appellation for a war that has never had a consistent name. The war lasted nine years, not seven, in the New World, although in fact Massachusetts forces actually pressed campaigns against the French in seven of the war years. To call it "the French and Indian War" fails to distinguish it from its predecessors, all of which were fought against the French and Indians; "the Fourth Intercolonial War," Herbert Levi Osgood's clinical-sounding contribution to its fund of names, is inaccurate in that Massachusetts fought the French five times, not four, during the colonial period. With considerable justification Lawrence Henry Gipson called it "the Great War for the Empire," and if any scholar ever earned the right to give the conflict a name, he did; yet his label shifts the focus to the empire, while this book concerns only the Bay Colony. The colonists called it "the French War," and later "the Old French War," but these are scarcely remembered in our own day and are no more distinctive than "the French and Indian War." Rather than compound the confusion by adding yet another name, I will refer to the conflict by what is at least the most common of its many misnomers, "the Seven Years' War."

Massachusetts and Its Principal Theaters of Military Activity in the Seven Years' War. After Lester J. Cappon et al., Atlas of Early American History: The Revolutionary Era, 7760-7790 (Princeton, N.J., 1976), 2-4. Drawn by Richard Stinely

6 Contexts of War would transform the scale and nature of provincial politics and create a new sense among Bay colonists of their importance and participation in the British Empire.3 Most significantly, the Seven Years' War would decisively terminate the imperial presence of France in North America. The war can thus be said to have decided the cultural and institutional future of the vast area between the Appalachian crest and the Mississippi River, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to Hudson's Bay. Since the late eighteenth century it has been argued that the removal of France made possible, or even inevitable, America's movement for independence.4 On a less elevated historical plane, the war was a vivid episode in the lives of thousands of men who served in Massachusetts' provincial armies. The provincials were, however, merely the humblest participants in a single theater of a world war. This was an enormous conflict that pitted the forces of Britain and Prussia against the combined might of France, Austria, and Spain all around the globe— in Europe, the Mediterranean, West Africa, India, the Philippines, and the Caribbean, as well as the wilderness of North America. Viewed from the provincial perspective, the war looked quite different than it did to the politicians and bureaucrats at Whitehall. Events in which the Bay colonists took part were seldom the result of their own province's initiatives: in general the colony responded less to local challenges and conditions than it did to policies instituted in Europe and altered to suit European concerns. So great indeed is the discrepancy between the war understood as a global conflict and the war as experienced by Massachusetts soldiers that the first order of business in interpreting the conflict from the provincial standpoint must be to establish a consistent perspective on the events of the struggle. Broadly speaking, the years of the war can be divided into four phases.5 The first period began in 1754, when French adventuring in the trans-Allegheny West triggered military responses from Virginia and 3. For the most complete account of the war's larger effects on Massachusetts political life, see William Pencak, War, Politics and Revolution in Provincial Massachusetts (Boston, 1981). 4. See John M. Murrin, "The French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the Counterfactual Hypothesis: Reflections on Lawrence Henry Gipson and John Shy," Reviews in American History, 1 (1973), 307-318. 5. This version of the war's events has been distilled from several standard accounts. The sources consulted were: Lawrence H. Gipson, The Great War for the Empire: The Years of Defeat, 1754-1757, The Victorious Years, 1758-1760, and The Culmination, 1760-1763, in Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution (New York, 1936-1969), VI-VIII, passim; Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay, ed. Lawrence Shaw Mayo (Cambridge, Mass., 1936 [orig. publ. London, 1828]), HI, 13-73; Benjamin W. Labaree, Colonial Massachusetts: A History (Millwood, N.Y., 1979); Douglas Edward Leach, Arms for Empire: A Military History of the British Colonies in North America, 1607-1763 (New York, 1973), 351-485; Stanley McCrory Pargellis, Lord Loudoun in North America (New Haven, Conn., 1933), passim; Francis Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe (Boston,... 1901 [orig. publ. Toronto (1884)]), passim; Howard H. Peckham, The Colonial Wars,

War and the Bay Colony 7 Massachusetts. Fighting proceeded with little interference or direction from Europe for two years. During this time Great Britain formulated no coherent war aims. Militarily, the beginnings of the conflict brought mixed results: the Anglo-Americans made halting advances in maritime Canada and stymied a French probe in northern New York, but suffered great setbacks in the Pennsylvania-Virginia backcountry. The second major phase of hostilities began with the declaration of war in Europe in 1756 and lasted until early 1758. This was a time of nearcatastrophe for British arms and of high tension between the colonies and the mother country. The British commander in chief in North America sought to bring colonial governments under his central control, and their resistance nearly scuttled the war effort in the New World. The third phase began in 1758 when William Pitt, who in effect had become prime minister in the previous year, assumed personal control of the British military program. Thereafter, the domineering Pitt directed the war with ferocious energy. ("Nobody ever entered his closet," wrote one political colleague, "who did not come out of it a braver man.")6 Pitt's openhanded fiscal policies and his willingness to seek accommodation with the colonies quickly won over the provincial governments, and harmonious relations were the rule for the rest of the war. The third phase was marked by great English victories in America, culminating in the conquest of Canada in 1760. The final stage of the war, 1761-1763, saw military emphases shift away from North America as the English pressed on to conquer French possessions in India, Africa, and the Caribbean. The nature of the conflict altered markedly late in the autumn of 1761. The new king, George III, earnestly desired peace, whereas Pitt wanted nothing more than to expand the war even further. By a secret compact with France, Spain had promised to begin hostilities against Britain if peace were not concluded before r May 1762. Pitt had proof of the treaty and resolved to attack Spain in Europe and the Americas before she could prepare for war. George III and his supporters in the ministry would have none of it, and Pitt resigned. Spain entered the war anyway and effectively prolonged the war for another year, but Britain's victory was never in doubt. Hostilities ended with the Treaty of Paris, 10 February 1763. 1689-1762 (Chicago, 1964), 120-221; Pencak, War, Politics and Revolution, 115-184; George A. Plimpton, "French and Indian Wars (1741-1763)," in Albert Bushnell Han, ed., Commonwealth History of Massachusetts (New York, 1928), II, 419—454; John A. Schutz, William Shirley: King's Governor of Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1961), 80-250; and John A. Schutz, Thomas Pownall, British Defender of American Liberty: A Study of Anglo-American Relations in the Eighteenth Century (Glendale, Calif., 1951), 105-180. Footnotes will be used in the following narrative section only in identifying direct quotations or in citing works not included in this note. 6. Isaac Bar re, quoted in Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe, II, 49.

8 Contexts of War With this overview in mind, the more specific developments in Massachusetts and the North American theater can be seen in perspective, during the four phases of the war.

Phase I: Governor Shirley's War, 1754-1755 If ever a conflict could be identified with one man, the Seven Years' War, at least in its early years, was William Shirley's war. Over the sixteen years (1741-1757) that he served as royal governor of Massachusetts, Shirley's political fortunes rose highest in wartime and ebbed lowest during periods of peace. While Shirley, like all royal governors, enjoyed enormous formal powers within the province he administered, his real power to govern depended instead on his ability to distribute patronage among his followers in the provincial legislature.7 In times of peace his patronage resources were simply too slender to ensure him anything like a majority in the Massachusetts General Court. War, however, brought a rich harvest of military commissions, supply and clothing contracts, credit, and hard cash. With these assets and the sense of common purpose war engendered, Shirley could create a truly effective network of supporters in the political and commercial elites of the province. Thus it was in his own interest as much as the king's that the governor became the most accomplished projector of military schemes in eighteenth-century North America. Although he had been trained as a lawyer and possessed no formal military background, Shirley proved to be as adept and resourceful a strategist as he was a politician. The governor's military career had begun auspiciously in King George's War when he promoted a New England expedition against the fortress of Louisbourg, on Cape Breton Island. Under the leadership of a merchantturned-general, William Pepperell, four thousand New England volunteers succeeded in capturing "the Gibraltar of the New World" on 17 June 1745. The siege lasted only six weeks, and the New Englanders were supported in it only by a British naval squadron and by—everyone agreed— the hand of God. Although the reduction of Louisbourg was virtually the only American victory of King George's War and the fortress was promptly handed back to the French at the conclusion of hostilities, the exploit had two abiding consequences. First, it inflated the military reputation of the New Englanders, particularly among themselves. Second, the home government reimbursed Massachusetts for the entire cost of the expedition, £183,649 sterling—the largest reimbursement in the history of the province. The sum was paid in coin, which in 1750 was used to provide a specie base for a reformed provincial currency, the Lawful Money 7. Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York, 1968), 72-80, 116-117.

War and the Bay Colony 9 that supplanted Massachusetts' grotesquely depreciated Old Tenor paper money. This measure halted the inflation that had plagued the colony for most of the century, and secured lasting support for the governor among the mercantile interest of the province. Thus in 1754 when Shirley began to hear of French intrigues in the Pennsylvania backcountry and of French forts being constructed along the Nova Scotia frontier, he lost no time in nudging the General Court toward belligerency. The expedition that he managed to promote that first year was tactically insignificant—a bloodless foray by eight hundred men, whom John Winslow of Marshfield led up the Kennebec River in search of a rumored French settlement. That the expedition found no settlement and slew no papists, and indeed had no military consequence whatever, did not faze the governor. The scent of patronage burned in his nostrils, and he bounded ahead with bigger plans for the following year. By the winter of 1754, however, Shirley found that he no longer had to act purely on his own initiative, since orders arrived at that point from England to begin taking more vigorous action against the French. After a good deal of fluster and confusion, the Newcastle ministry had decided to remove the French "encroachments" from the colonies' frontiers in 1755. Two understrength Irish regiments under Major General Edward Braddock were accordingly dispatched to Virginia. Braddock was named commander in chief of his majesty's forces in North America. Shirley, with the rank of major general, was made his second in command and ordered to cooperate with the regular military authorities in Nova Scotia to limit the influence of the French in the area. The governor thus approached the Massachusetts Assembly with a plan to raise two colonial battalions, to be paid from the royal exchequer but otherwise to serve as provincials, for a limited term. The legislators responded enthusiastically because, as a discerning contemporary observed, Shirley enjoyed "one peculiar advantage for promoting his military schemes in the assembly. Many of the field officers and other officers who were at Louisbourg [in 1745] . . . were now members of the assembly, and the more readily fell in with his proposals."8 Again, John Winslow was to be the chief officer from Massachusetts. The General Court voted two thousand soldiers, who were soon recruited and dispatched to Nova Scotia. Together with a small contingent of British regulars, they succeeded in ejecting the "encroaching" French garrisons from Forts Beausejour and Gaspereau. The New Englanders spent the rest of the summer in rounding up and deporting the indigenous Acadians. These so-called French neutrals, an inoffensive peasant population of about six thousand, had been living quietly under British control since 8. Hutchinson, Mass.-Bay, III, 20-21.

io Contexts of War their homeland had been added to the empire during Queen Anne's War. Now they were expelled because most refused to take oaths of allegiance to the crown and were therefore deemed a security risk. The Acadians were dispersed throughout the thirteen mainland colonies, and their confiscated lands were colonized by migrants from New England.9 Even as Shirley was planning to send provincials to Nova Scotia, he was also trying to persuade the Massachusetts assembly to appropriate funds for a second force, to be used in operations to the west of the province. Everyone knew that the French had fortified Crown Point, on Lake Champlain, in 1731; Shirley now advocated a large expedition to neutralize that post, Fort Saint Frederic. Massachusetts, he proposed, would contribute twelve hundred men, Connecticut one thousand, New Hampshire six hundred, Rhode Island four hundred, and New York eight hundred men to an expeditionary army that would be commanded by William Johnson, New York's powerful commissioner of Indian affairs. Some of the Massachusetts representatives balked at the plan, since in this case the colony, not the crown, would have to pay the soldiers' salaries. Shirley argued in response that reimbursements would be voted by Parliament, just as they had been for the 1745 expedition against Louisbourg. Reassured, the legislators appropriated funds for the mission. Problems of coordination delayed the departure of the force until late summer 1755, but about thirty-five hundred provincials and four hundred Indians eventually assembled at the head of Lake George, the principal tributary of Lake Champlain. The impending change of season was lessening the likelihood that Johnson's expedition would ever get beyond its camp, when fourteen hundred French and Indians under the Baron Dieskau arrived on 8 September, spoiling for a fight. In the melee that followed, Dieskau's troops inflicted heavy damage on the colonials before Dieskau himself was wounded and captured, and the raiders withdrew in confusion. This violent, muddled encounter, with casualties of about 230 for the French and 262 for the provincials, was soon dignified as the Battle of Lake George and greeted in New England as a signal victory. The soldiers on the spot were too weak and disorganized to pursue the enemy back to Fort Saint Frederic, however. Johnson, shaken by a slight wound to what was diplomatically called "the thigh," elected to go on the defensive and build a fort near the site of the battle. This post, Fort William Henry, would mark the limit of the Anglo-American advance in New York for the next three years. Meanwhile, other events had altered the course of the war. On 9 July 9. See Gipson, Years of Defeat, 243-344, for the most complete account of the fortunes of the Acadian population in exile.

War and the Bay Colony 11 the North American commander in chief, Edward Braddock, was killed in the wilderness of Pennsylvania when a French and Indian force attacked his sixteen-hundred-man expedition at the Monongahela River. This halted the British effort to expel the French from their outpost on the Ohio, Fort Duquesne, and it caused the supreme command in North America to devolve upon William Shirley. Shirley canceled the expedition he had been leading against the French military and fur-trading post at Fort Niagara, set his troops to work constructing a complex of forts near the eastern end of Lake Ontario, at Oswego, and returned to New York City to assume his new position. Thus at the end of 1755, the first year of serious fighting, the British had made modest gains in maritime Canada while suffering a serious defeat that cost them the only experienced senior commander in the North American theater. The French, stung but not seriously discomfited by the loss of two small Acadian posts and the capture of Dieskau at Lake George, moved to reinforce Canada and appointed a new commanding general, the brilliant Louis Joseph, marquis de Montcalm. The British command remained for the time being in the hands of William Shirley, who with characteristic vigor began to plan a war of conquest. Because the Newcastle ministry as yet limited its official policy to the removal of French encroachments, Shirley conceived his program primarily in terms of provincial efforts. Assuring the northern colonial assemblies that parliamentary reimbursements would be forthcoming, he obtained authorizations to raise eighty-eight hundred soldiers (seven thousand of whom eventually reached the field) from New England and New York to use in expelling the French from Crown Point. Massachusetts led the way once again. Spurred by the promise that John Winslow would command the expedition and further strengthened in resolve by Shirley's promise of a thirty-thousand-pound-sterling loan, the General Court approved the enlistment of three thousand men for the coming year. Shirley as commander in chief, like Shirley as governor of Massachusetts, used military contracts and commissions as patronage to create a network of personal supporters. The policy was undeniably effective in the short run, since it lined influential pockets and allowed the colonial assemblies to exercise considerable control over the war in return for their financial support. It was, however, a most unorthodox way to run a war, and it soon proved to be Shirley's downfall. Almost from the moment Shirley had assumed command, the ambitious and egocentric lieutenant governor of New Jersey, Thomas Pownall, had been scheming against him. Pownall found natural allies in the powerful De Lancey faction in New York, competitors of the Livingston-Morris party, to whom Shirley had awarded immense supply contracts. By January 1756, Pownall and the De Lanceys had made enough headway with

12 Contexts of War the members of Newcastle's administration to seal Shirley's fate. The ministers dithered, however, and decided on no replacement until March. Shirley himself did not know that he had been dismissed until June. His successor was John Campbell, fourth earl of Loudoun, a Scots professional officer who had served in the suppression of the 1745 Highland rebellion and who was esteemed a proficient administrator. Shirley's successor as governor of Massachusetts was none other than Thomas Pownall. Supply contracts were diverted to the De Lanceys. Shirley, his career in ruins, was recalled to England under suspicion of malfeasance. His tangled accounts with the Livingstons were audited by the Treasury, a process that was not complete until 1763.

Phase II: Centralization and Defeat, 1756-1757 The change in command profoundly affected military operations in 1756. Lord Loudoun fervently wished to exercise direct control over provincial troops, a measure that the provincials resisted with equal fervor. Weeks were lost in apparently trivial squabbling over rank and precedence while Loudoun and his American subordinates (who preferred to think of themselves as his allies) took each other's measure. The marquis de Montcalm, meanwhile, had assumed command of the French forces in Canada and now wasted no time in launching an expedition against the British outpost at Fort Oswego. The garrison, weakened by disease and lack of provisions, surrendered after a brief defense and was carried en masse to Canada. This setback threw the Anglo-American forces in New York into a panicky defense and precluded all further thought of marching on Crown Point. It also bought the French enough time to complete an advanced post at the south end of Lake Champlain, between Crown Point and the British position at the head of Lake George. The new strongpoint, Fort Carillon (known among the Anglo-Americans by its geographical name, Ticonderoga) would pose the principal obstacle to a British advance on Canada for the next three years. The 1756 campaign ended with scarcely a shot fired by Winslow's provincials, who had come thoroughly to detest their new commander in chief, Lord Loudoun. The feeling was mutual. Unlike Shirley, Loudoun was a professional soldier who believed that he deserved the unquestioning obedience of the provinces, particularly in helping to pay for the war. He had brought several regular regiments with him and proposed to do the fighting mainly with them. Loudoun wanted provincial troops for work mainly as auxiliaries, and he wanted provincial monies on his own terms. Never disposed to dicker with the colonial assemblies, he flatly refused to follow Shirley's

War and the Bay Colony 13 policy of promising reimbursements. Lord Loudoun's instructions conferred great authority, in effect making him England's North American viceroy. He expected to create a centralized military effort but had no knowledge of American political realities. This ignorance of American ways would soon thwart his attempts to wage war efficiently. Loudoun's imperial policy and imperious personality practically extinguished colonial cooperation. Massachusetts, enthusiastic in 1755 and 1756, only grudgingly complied with the new commander's directives in 1757. Only eighteen hundred Massachusetts provincials were raised, under a single colonel. They served mainly on the New York frontier, under the command of regular officers at Fort William Henry and Fort Edward (an older post about thirteen miles to the south of Lake George, on the upper Hudson River). For the first time, provincials were under redcoat discipline and provisioning, as they would be for the rest of the war. Provincials remained summer soldiers, however, who served for a year or less and were paid by their colonies rather than the crown. This made them inefficient and expensive and increased Loudoun's reluctance to employ them in large numbers. In England, William Pitt's star was rising rapidly, and he was gaining more and more control over the war effort. In 1757 he directed Loudoun to put the New York sector on the defensive and to concentrate on mounting a siege of Louisbourg. If that great fortress could be captured, Pitt reasoned, the Saint Lawrence would be closed to French shipping, and Canada's defenders would eventually be strangled by lack of supplies and reinforcements. Loudoun's effort to seize the stronghold first was stalled by unfavorable weather, then was blocked at the last moment by the arrival of a French naval squadron. On 4 August he called off the attempt. One day earlier, far to the west, a powerful French army under Montcalm had laid siege to Fort William Henry at the head of Lake George. The garrision, which included eight hundred Massachusetts troops and the province's highest ranking officer, held out for only six days. News of the defeat, arriving in Massachusetts on the heels of reports that the Louisbourg venture had been abandoned, dealt a heavy blow to the morale of the Bay colonists and greatly diminished their legislature's willingness to cooperate further with the supreme commander. Through the winter of 1757-1758, Loudoun continued to press the increasingly resistant colonial assemblies for troops and money. His haughty manner infuriated provincial politicians, whose sensibilities he had already offended by his refusal to grant them any say in the disposition of the troops and funds he demanded. The supreme commander responded to their opposition by trying to force colonial governors to compel the assemblies to obey orders.

14 Contexts of War What Loudoun required of the governors was politically costly, if not impossible. His policies were especially at odds with Thomas Pownall's plans. From the time Pownall had succeeded Shirley as governor of Massachusetts, he had allied himself with country-party elements in the General Court, the very politicians who were most averse to administrative centralization. The climax of their defiance came in early March 1758: with Thomas Pownall standing idly by, the Massachusetts House of Representatives refused to vote any troops whatever for the coming campaign.

Phase III: Pitt, Reimbursement, and Victory, 1758-1760 The legislators of the Bay Colony had never been known for sweet temper or tractability, but the General Court was in a particularly stubborn, ugly mood on the morning of 10 March 1758 when a surprising packet of letters arrived from William Pitt. The letters informed the members of the assembly that Lord Loudoun was being recalled and went on to ask that they authorize the recruitment of an unprecedented number of soldiers for the coming campaign. By the end of that afternoon, the House of Representatives had unanimously voted to raise seven thousand troops and to place them at the disposal of the new commander in chief. Pitt achieved this remarkable reversal in colonial attitude by jettisoning, along with Loudoun, everything Loudoun had stood for. In his request for troops, Pitt had promised reimbursement, in specie or credit, from the Treasury. In appealing directly to the assembly, moreover, he had signaled the demotion of the commander in chief from viceroy to mere military leader. This at once freed all future supreme commanders from the necessity of browbeating reluctant governors and recalcitrant assemblies, and it reassured the assemblymen that the demands of the war would not be used to deprive them of control over their colonies' finances. Pitt's new "requisition system" worked smoothly from the beginning. In 1758 and every year thereafter, "Pitt wrote . . . to the governors asking for men and promising financial assistance; the assembly voted them, and then notified the commander in chief that they were on the march; [he] sent warrants for victualling them on the road at the usual fourpence a day, and named the rendezvous; the assembly then collected from parliament its reimbursement for the expenses of the campaign. There was no pleading, no cajoling, and few threats."10 Lord Loudoun's niggling insistence on control and compliance had been sand in the gears of colonial cooperation. Pitt's appreciation of the matchless lubricating qualities of money and autonomy, on the other hand, guaranteed an enthusiastic American response to his imperial enterprise. 10. Pargellis, Loudoun, 351-352.

War and the Bay Colony 15

r

MdisackusetTs nnd ttaCNewV/orJ^ Theater of Operations, 01.1755

Massachusetts and the New York Theater of Operations, circa 7759. After Lester J. Cappon et al., Atlas of Early American History: The Revolutionary Era, 7760-7790 (Princeton, N.J., 1976), 2, 4. Drawn by Richard Stinely

16 Contexts of War Reimbursement cost Great Britain dearly—over a million pounds sterling in the course of the conflict—but Parliament's grants by no means enabled Massachusetts to avoid paying for its share of the war. Only about two-fifths of the Bay Colony's total expenses for the war were reimbursed, and the government borrowed so much money that province taxes remained at wartime levels until 1770." Pitt's transfusions of specie and credit merely allowed the government of Massachusetts to continue the fight without going bankrupt. So precarious were provincial finances in September 1758 that the province was teetering on the brink of default when the reimbursement for expenses incurred in 1756 arrived and allowed the government to pay its short-term debt.12 Pitt's new policy of decentralization and subsidy marked a major divide in the political history of the Seven Years' War. Militarily, too, the years after 1757 were quite different from the previous ones. The new commander in chief, Major General James Abercromby ("a heavy man," according to a subordinate officer, and "an indifferent soldier" in the estimation of Francis Parkman)13 had been Loudoun's second in command. Pitt limited Abercromby's authority so strictly that Pitt himself became de facto commander in chief, exercising direct control over Abercromby's chief subordinate officers. When Pitt dispatched Major General Jeffery Amherst and Brigadier James Wolfe to besiege Louisbourg in 1758, he allowed Abercromby no part in directing the operation. When Pitt ordered Abercromby to attack the French at Ticonderoga, he even included detailed instructions on how to deploy his troops. Pitt steadfastly refused to delegate any authority to his subordinates; with equal self-assurance he overrode the aversion of regular officers to employing large numbers of provincials. He was convinced that only vast numbers could decisively beat the French and thus insisted that the colonies raise large bodies of provincials every year, even though his regular field commanders regarded them as a burden. The seven thousand troops Massachusetts raised in 1758 were posted primarily to Abercromby's command, where most participated in the expedition against Ticonderoga. At least twelve thousand men, the largest 11. Jack P. Greene, "The Seven Years' War and the American Revolution: The Causal Relationship Reconsidered," in Peter Marshall and Glyn Williams, eds., The British Atlantic Empire before the American Revolution (Totowa, N.J., 1980), 98. For tax levels, see Joseph B. Felt, "Statistics of Taxation in Massachusetts," American Statistical Association, Collections, I (1847), 211-581. 12. Thomas Pownall to William Pitt, 30 Sept. 1758; copy in Parkman Papers, XLII, 282-288, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston (a transcription of the same from State Papers, America and West Indies, Vol. LXXI, Public Record Office, London). 13. Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe, II, 93 (quoting James Wolfe); II, 51.

War and the Bay Colony 17 assemblage of troops in New York during the war, took part in the attack on 8 July. Nearly five hundred of them never returned from the series of frontal assaults Abercromby launched against the French field works held by Montcalm and only about three thousand defenders. At the end of that botched and brutal day, Abercromby ordered a withdrawal that soon became a pell-mell retreat back to the head of Lake George. Anglo-American morale was shattered, and loss of confidence caused the rest of the summer to be spent in constructing a new post, Fort George, near the ruins of Fort William Henry. Montcalm's successful defense of Ticonderoga was the last significant French victory of the war. Less than three weeks later, Louisbourg surrendered to Amherst. This effectively sealed off the Canadian interior from resupply. A month later, Lieutenant Colonel John Bradstreet delivered another blow that was almost equally damaging, and far more surprising. Bradstreet, a bullheaded man and an accomplished egotist, was an American-born regular officer who early in the war had commanded the provincial batteau service. This corps of rivermen ferried supplies along the waterways between British forts in New York, and, as their leader, Bradstreet had become obsessed with the idea of using them to mount an amphibious expedition against Fort Frontenac, on Lake Ontario. The principal French fur-trading entrepot for the interior, Fort Frontenac lay on the northeast shore of the lake, opposite the ruins of Oswego, at so great a distance from the major British forts in the Hudson Valley and at Lake George that the French had deemed it secure, leaving it with only a small garrison. Bradstreet organized a force of men (mainly provincials) familiar with river navigation who were to travel from the Hudson to Lake Ontario via the Mohawk and Onondaga rivers, cross the lake, and lay siege to the fort using only small arms and light artillery. His little army surprised the French on 27 August, captured the fort, and seized an immense quantity of booty. The next day they sailed off in a captured brigantine and a schooner laden with furs, after burning seven other ships and destroying the fort. Even more important than the central position of Frontenac in Canada's fur-trade network were its functions as the indispensable link in the resupply chain for France's western forts and as the base for French shipping on Lake Ontario. With Frontenac and the lake fleet gone, all the western forts—Niagara and Detroit on the Great Lakes, Duquesne and the others in the Ohio country—began to suffer shortages and soon became indefensible. When Brigadier John Forbes finally managed to cut through a road to Fort Duquesne, the French garrison was too poorly supplied to resist and withdrew without a fight. By the close of the 1758 campaign, the French had thus surrendered control of the trans-Allegheny

18 Contexts of War West, had lost all safe communication between Montreal and the Great Lakes forts, and were beginning to experience supply shortages caused by the closing of the Saint Lawrence. It was only too clear to Montcalm that Canada itself would soon become impossible to defend. Abercromby was called home in the fall of 1758 to have his dubious achievements recognized by promotion to lieutenant general. His successor in the supreme command was Jeffery Amherst, the circumspect, competent victor of Louisbourg. Pitt's policies for 1759 continued to conform to the pattern established the year before. Massachusetts again responded enthusiastically. Initially the General Court voted to raise five thousand men and then granted a special bounty to recruit fifteen hundred more volunteers. These soldiers were intended in part to garrison Louisbourg and other Maritime forts, freeing regulars to participate in expeditionary forces. In addition to acting as garrison troops, the provincials would also participate in two of the year's campaigns, following James Wolfe up the Saint Lawrence to attack Quebec and aiding in Amherst's attempt to dislodge the French from Ticonderoga and Crown Point. Amherst's force reached Ticonderoga on 22 July 1759. The defenders, strapped for men and supplies, held out for only four days before withdrawing. On the night of 26 July they blew up the fort's powder magazine, set fire to its buildings, and fled to Crown Point. Amherst cautiously decided to repair the damaged structure before pursuing the enemy; but when he sent scouts down the lake to Crown Point, he learned that the French had withdrawn from that fort as well. On 31 July the British accordingly took possession of the second post, also blown up and burnt by its retreating garrison. Amherst again decided to rebuild before proceeding after the enemy. In addition to ordering a whole new fort constructed, Amherst also sent men to build a road eastward from Crown Point to Township Number Four, on the Connecticut River in New Hampshire. Finally, he decided to build a small flotilla to keep the four French gunboats on Lake Champlain from menacing his troops' batteaux when the time finally came to set off for Canada. Amherst's great caution saved lives but cost him the rest of the campaigning season. In November he dismissed his provincials and sent the regulars into winter quarters without taking further action against the French. More than two hundred miles to the north, Amherst's impetuous subordinate Wolfe was showing no such restraint. With a force of nine thousand he had sailed up the Saint Lawrence as soon as the passage was clear of ice and had proceeded to attack the French in the vicinity of Quebec. All summer long the two sides fenced for advantage. Finally, on 13 September, Wolfe managed to infiltrate forty-five hundred men through Montcalm's defenses and position them on a plateau called the Plains of Abraham

War and the Bay Colony 19 outside the walls of Quebec. Montcalm immediately attacked with an equal number of regulars and militia. In the battle that followed, the lessdisciplined French force lost heavily—1,400 casualties against 660 for the British. Both commanders suffered mortal wounds. Quebec capitulated five days later, and Brigadier John Murray settled in with a strong garrison to hold the city through the winter. By the beginning of 1760, no one could doubt that the British had gained the upper hand. New France had been cut off from the Mississippi basin, and its advanced posts on Lake Champlain were gone. With Louisbourg in English hands, any attempt to resupply Canada via the Saint Lawrence was out of the question, and stocks of materiel were declining fast. Many men had been lost from the defending forces and could not be replaced. The ablest commander in New France lay dead; his successor, the chevalier de Levis, was a good officer but no peer of Montcalm. Brigadier General Murray's garrison at Quebec was a dagger pressing into the very heart of Canada. Unless the severely weakened and demoralized French could dislodge Murray's force before reinforcements were shipped up the Saint Lawrence in the spring, New France would be at the mercy of the English. The British campaign of 1760 was accordingly planned to deliver a massive coup de grace to French resistance. Pitt asked the colonial governments to duplicate their contributions of the previous year. Massachusetts once more responded with zeal, resolving to raise five thousand troops and to reenlist as many as possible of the men who had been serving over the winter in the Maritime forts. The expeditions planned for 1760 formed a three-pronged final assault on the territory remaining under French control. General Murray, reinforced from the Saint Lawrence, would ascend the river toward Montreal. At the same time, Amherst would proceed from Albany via the Mohawk to Lake Ontario and thence down the Saint Lawrence. Brigadier General William Haviland would lead a force from Crown Point over Lake Champlain, driving the French back from the line of forts they still held along the Richelieu River. All three armies would converge simultaneously on Montreal, where Canada's last defenders would be trapped. The Massachusetts troops not assigned to garrison duty for the most part joined Haviland's thirty-four-hundred-man force, made up of two regular and three provincial regiments. They first encountered the enemy at Ileaux-Noix, a fortified island at the head of the Richelieu River. The British opened fire on 23 August. On the night of the twenty-seventh, the French fell back to Fort Saint-Jean and Fort Chambly on the lower Richelieu approach to Montreal. Haviland left his wounded at Ile-aux-Noix and pursued, reaching Fort Saint-Jean on the twenty-eighth only to find it in

2O Contexts of War

The Campaign A0aintf~ Montreal, J/60

The Campaign against Montreal, 7760. After Lester ]. Cappon ef a/., At/as o/ £ar/y American History: The Revolutionary Era, 7760-7790 (Princeton, N.J., 1976), 2-4. Drawn by Richard Stinely

War and the Bay Colony 21 flames and its garrison retiring to Chambly. On i September, after brief resistance, Chambly's defenders surrendered, and the route to Montreal was left unobstructed. By 6 September Amherst's force lay above the city, and Murray's was encamped below it on the Saint Lawrence. With Haviland approaching overland against crumbling resistance, the governorgeneral of New France, the marquis de Vaudreuil-Cavagnal, had no choice but to ask for terms. On 8 September he surrendered, ending the war in Canada after six years of hard fighting. Great celebration attended the arrival of the news in Massachusetts. "No where," wrote Thomas Hutchinson, was it "received with greater joy, no part of the king's dominions being more interested in it." H The men and women of the Bay Colony now anticipated unmolested peace and prosperity, with eventual relief from their astronomical tax rates. But as their newly appointed governor, Francis Bernard, hastened to remind them, the war was not yet won. Although fewer of their sons would fight in the coming two years, Massachusetts inhabitants would find that their cooperation and money were still essential to the war effort.

Phase IV: Nunc Dimittis, 1761-1763 Early in 1761 Pitt renewed his requests and his promises. The General Court responded by voting to raise three thousand provincials, who spent the year quietly manning forts, thereby releasing regular troops to campaign against France's New World possessions. By now Massachusetts merchants and politicians had become habituated to war and its benefits. Military contracts for the supply of garrisons were lucrative and provided merchants with assured income. Parliament's grants meant a measure of tax relief but, more important, they provided a steady inflow of specie—a vital item if Massachusetts' hard money economy were to continue to expand. But the grants acted as a stick as well as a carrot. Since the province's claims for any year were reviewed and paid only after about two years had passed, Massachusetts could ill afford to antagonize its parliamentary banker by becoming uncooperative. By 1760 or 1761 at the very latest, the Bay Colony's whole political and economic system had come to depend on the imperial war-making machinery. Massachusetts provincials saw battle for the last time in 1762. The assembly had voted to raise thirty-two hundred men, again for garrison duty. In July, however, a small French force seized Newfoundland, making it necessary to recapture the island and its profitable fishery. Most of the redcoats were committed to the Caribbean, so a force was scraped to14. Hutchinson, Mass.-Bay, III, 60.

22 Contexts of War gether from regulars billeted at New York and a Massachusetts regiment stationed at Halifax, Nova Scotia. Under Colonel William Amherst, the supreme commander's younger brother, this makeshift expedition dislodged the French after five days of fighting in September. The Newfoundland gambit was France's last effort in North America to gain an asset to bargain away in the peace negotiations; it may also have represented an attempt to divert British attention from Havana. Spain had entered the war on the side of France in early 1762 but was incapable of undertaking any offensive action in the New World. Havana was therefore added to the British program of conquest in the Caribbean as a means of making the Spanish come to terms quickly. The fighting in Cuba, though complicated by heat and disease, was not drawn out. Havana surrendered on 13 August. News of the conquest was greeted in Massachusetts with raptures almost as great as those that had followed the capitulation of Canada. A Boston diarist, John Boyle, recorded on 16 September 1762 the "public rejoicings on account of the reduction of the Havana": Sermon preached by Dr. Sewall; cadets mustered; bells rung; batteries fired; concert of music; the town illuminated; bonfires, etc. Many loyal healths drank: a vast quantity of liquor consumed, and General Winslow of Plymouth so intoxicated as to jump on the table, and break a great number of bowls, glasses, etc.15 Winslow's considerable bulk may have been at odds with his enthusiasm, but if ever there had been cause for dancing on tables in Boston, this was it. The Treaty of Paris only confirmed the totality of the British triumph. To many of the inhabitants of New England, the successful conclusion of the war heralded nothing less than the beginning of the millennium. Even the most worldly of colonists undoubtedly agreed that the elimination of New England's perennial antagonist and the accession of immeasurable tracts of virgin land could hardly fail to produce a thousand years of peace and prosperity in North America. But the millennium, as we know, did not ensue. The American Revolution did, and with it came the most persistent problems in the interpretation of the period. As Francis Parkman observed a century ago, "It is the nature of great events to obscure the great events that come before them. The Seven Years' War . . . hi America is half lost to sight behind the stormcloud of the War of Independence."16 The era of the Seven Years' War, for 15. John Boyle, "A Journal of Occurrences in Boston," i6Sept. 1762, MS at Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 16. Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe, I, 3.

War and the Bay Colony 23 better or worse, will probably always be identified in American historiography as the pre-Revolutionary period, and historians will no doubt go on looking there, as many already have looked, for harbingers of the Revolution. But there are dangers in this approach. The easily forgotten point is that at the close of the Seven Years' War no living soul in Massachusetts could foresee the coming separation from Great Britain, and no one desired it. With the conclusion of the war in 1763, American commitment to the empire reached its zenith. No less than other Americans, New Englanders were pleased to be part of the British system—more pleased, perhaps, than ever before—and were proud to have participated in the British triumph. They embraced British heroes as their own. In William Pitt and Jeffery Amherst they found symbols of martial statesmanship and statesmanlike generalship; in Viscount Howe and James Wolfe they saw fallen heroes of legendary valor. During the war and in its aftermath, settlements were named in honor of Amherst and Pitt in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Wolfe had his memory secured in public media ranging from memorial eulogies to the signboards on country taverns. The normally parsimonious Massachusetts Assembly voted £250 sterling to place a tablet, in "Testimony to the . . . Services and Military Virtues of the late Lord Viscount Howe," in Westminster Abbey.17 Examples could easily be multiplied of such admiration for British heroes and of enthusiasm for the triumphant empire. It is therefore puzzling to find this fund of good will exhausted in less than a decade and a half, and richly ironic to see veterans of the Seven Years' War taking up arms again in 1775, against the redcoats beside whom they had so recently served. When New Englanders named towns and taverns after their British heroes, they were commemorating the Seven Years' War as a public event. But their personal experiences of the war were often at variance with the public memory, and these personal experiences ultimately proved more important as a guide to understanding their world in the perplexing years that followed the Peace of Paris. To people with no inkling of what the future might bring, the years from 1763 to 1775 were not a prerevolutionary, but a postwar period. They reasoned about events that they encountered then on the basis of their experiences and their beliefs. And their beliefs were formed, just as their experiences were dominated, by the greatest war the eighteenth century had yet seen. Everyone who has known veterans of a war in the twentieth century has heard war stories told, and almost every veteran succumbs sooner or later to the temptation to reminisce. The impulse to talk about one's military 17. Ibid., II, 391-394; John Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 140-148; Gipson, Victorious Years, 224-225 (Howe's memorial).

24 Contexts of War service proceeds in part from the sharpness of the impression made by shared adversity or danger, and in part from the critical time in men's lives that the impression is made—late adolescence or early manhood. Military service, especially when it occurs under harsh conditions, tends to promote a powerful sense of camaraderie among soldiers, a camaraderie that is perhaps the strongest emotional bond they have formed outside their families of origin. In later life, the experience and the community can provide common reference points, benchmarks of memory—shared recollections that inform the veteran's judgment about his world. Mention Pearl Harbor, Bataan, and Bastogne to a group of World War II veterans, for example, and chances are excellent that you will elicit a highly consistent set of responses that will have little to do with geography. Pearl Harbor, you will find, means sneak attack; Bataan signifies the extermination of the defenseless; Bastogne means fortitude and defiance. What were originally mere place-names have been transformed into powerful metaphors in the minds of a generation of American veterans. Identifications remain similar because the community within which they were first formed agreed so thoroughly on the events' significance. More routine experiences, too, provide landmarks in the geography of veterans' memory. C-rations, basic training, foxhole, and company punishment are words that carry little more than abstract significance for civilians, but they can evoke vivid recollections among those who have eaten, endured, dug, or suffered. Not all soldiers experience the terrors of combat, and those who do may try for years to communicate its meaning, or perhaps to block out the memory. But no one who has seen battle can either forget it or completely describe it. It is an experience that remains fully accessible only to those who have undergone it, fully understandable only among those who have shared it. This was as true for the veterans of the Seven Years' War as it is for veterans of modern wars. Like a modern recruit, a New England soldier of the 17505 or 17605 was most often a young man at the time of his enlistment. Unlike a modern recruit, however, the eighteenth-century provincial's frame of reference usually did not extend far beyond the region in which he had been born and raised. The province he served was a loose confederation of mutually suspicious towns, held together by a distrust of outsiders that was even more intense than their suspicion of each other and united by a narrow provincial culture. At the core of their outlook lay the assumption that New England was bound by covenant to God Almighty. Few institutions transcended the boundaries of individual towns; communication and transportation links between settlements were poor at best. Little currency circulated outside the few large eastern towns. Although literacy was fairly widespread, reading matter was limited mainly to reli-

War and the Bay Colony 25 gious publications and to such newspapers as reached the countryside from Boston. All in all, mid-eighteenth-century Massachusetts offered its inhabitants few opportunities for corporate experience that surmounted parochial bounds and concerns. The wars of the eighteenth century were the great exceptions to this generalization, and the Seven Years' War was the greatest exception of all. The conflict did not, however, affect all New Englanders similarly. Merchants enterprising enough to obtain military contracts, for example, found that the war offered unrivaled opportunities for profit. Farmers capable of raising surpluses and getting them to the market shared the discovery of John Adams's satirical persona, Humphrey Ploughjogger: "In the war time I could sell my fatt ocksen, and sheep, and every thing I could raise on my place, for a pretty good round price in muney." At war's end such men might well agree with Humphrey that "the war did me some good," although they had run the risk of losing sons (Humphrey claimed to have lost two), and most would find themselves nearly unable to pay their taxes once the fighting stopped.18 The largest group to be touched by the conflict, however, was the group with the most uniform wartime experience, provincial soldiers. Harsh months of campaigning, punctuated by an occasional, terrifying battle, became a profound part of their experience. Because they were mainly young men who owned little real property, soldiers had scant influence in their communities during the war itself. By the time the great imperial crisis reached its climax in the mid-iyyos, however, the men who had been soldiers in the Seven Years' War had grown into their late thirties and early forties and were coming into their own in towns throughout the province. Their fathers, for whom "the war did . . . some good," were passing from the political scene. The veterans on the whole were less likely than their fathers to remember the war favorably and were unlikely to be well disposed toward the redcoats with whom they had served. The Seven Years' War had been, in effect, the greatest educational experience in their lives. It had transformed them from a mere group of contemporaries into a generation of men, whose common knowledge included a powerful set of lessons about themselves, about the British, and about war itself. The rest of this book examines the content of the war's lessons and the conditions under which those lessons were learned: conditions that made them impossible to forget. 18. Humphrey Ploughjogger [John Adams] to the Boston Evening Post, 20 June 1763, in Robert J. Taylor, ed., The Papers of John Adams, I (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 64.

Chapter 2 •> "Sons of Some of the Best Yeomen in New England" Army and Society in Provincial Massachusetts

At the outset of the Seven Years' War, Massachusetts Bay's native military tradition stretched back a century and a quarter, to the founding of the colony. Dozens of laws dealing with military organization and discipline were on the statute books, and—at least in theory—its male inhabitants were universally trained in the arts of war. The Bay Colony's defense rested ultimately on its militia, which with certain exceptions (ministers, slaves, civil magistrates, Indians, the students and faculty of Harvard, and a few others) consisted of every able-bodied man between sixteen and sixty years of age.1 Its very comprehensiveness, however, made the militia a problematic military tool. Because its regiments were basically identical to the male populations of whole regions, they could be used only briefly, in extreme emergencies—in response, for example, to an invasion. Even in the seventeenth century, militia units, properly speaking, had seldom functioned in offensive roles. Since any attempt to pursue an enemy would have left the militiamen's homes defenseless, campaigns were carried out instead by battalions of volunteers, while militia regiments came to represent only the manpower pool from which the volunteers could be raised. After King William's War, during the governorship of the earl of Bellomont (1697-1701), laws were passed that brought the principles of Massachusetts' military organization into line with practical necesI. For a survey of colonial systems of defense which emphasizes Massachusetts, see Douglas Edward Leach, Arms for Empire: A Military History of the British Colonies in North America, 1607-1763 (New York, 1973), esp. 8-40; and John Shy, "A New Look at the Colonial Militia," in Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (New York, 1976), 22-33. F°r the origins of the system, see also Jack S. Radabaugh, "The Militia of Colonial Massachusetts," Military Affairs, XVIII (1954), 1-18; and the interpretative essay of Timothy H. Breen, "The Covenanted Militia of Massachusetts Bay: English Background and New World Development," in Breen, Puritans and Adventurers: Change and Persistence in Early America (New York, 1980), 24-45. In addition, several dissertations deal with colonial military organization. The most useful of these are Archibald Hanna, Jr., "New England Military Institutions, 1693-1750" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, I95l); John M. Murrin, "Anglicizing an American Colony: The Transformation of Provincial Massachusetts" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1966), esp. chap. 3; and Richard Henry Marcus, "The Militia of Colonial Connecticut, 1693-1775: An Institutional Study" (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado, 1965), esp. chaps. 5 and 6.

Army and Society 27 sity. The militia was defined thereafter not as an army per se, but as an all-purpose military infrastructure: a combination of home guard, draft board, and rear-echelon supply network.2 Thus during the long series of wars with the French and Indians the real fighting was done not by the militia, but by provincial armies, which the colonial government created from men recruited for single campaigns and sent to the field under leaders who held their rank independently of the militia command structure. On its training days the militia continued to provide a modest degree of compulsory military practice for most of the men in the province. If the danger were great enough, militia units could conceivably take the field themselves, as several regiments did in 1757. But the most important function of the militia was to provide volunteers—or, if necessary, conscripts—for the provincial armies. Annually recruited provincial armies thus formed the backbone of the Bay Colony's military capability during the Seven Years' War. Like armed forces in general, provincial armies were drawn from surplus manpower— those who could be spared from essential economic tasks to perform the job of fighting. In the mother country the rank and file of the regular army was composed of permanently marginal members of British society. Convicts, vagabonds, sundry social misfits, and natives of the impoverished backcountry of Scotland and Ireland traditionally constituted a great proportion of the king's troops. As the eighteenth century wore on, these were increasingly joined by people cast adrift by enclosure and industrialization: farmers and laborers from depressed rural areas, artisans whose skills were obsolescent, and other poor but respectable folk whose positions in society had been eroded in an era of rapid economic change. For such men military service offered an alternative to a bleak proletarian life—or even starvation.3 2. Murrin, "Anglicizing an American Colony," 72-90; Hanna, "Military Institutions," 121, 283-290, and passim. 3. Sylvia R. Frey, The British Soldier in North America: A Social History of Military Life in the Revolutionary Period (Austin, Tex., 1981), 6—16; Eric Robson, "The Armed Forces and the Art of War," in The New Cambridge Modem History, VII: The Old Regime, 77/3-63, ed. J.O. Lindsay (Cambridge, 1957), 175-176. For arguments that American soldiers in the 18th century represented similarly marginal groups, see Shy, "A New Look," in Shy, People Armed, 30; William Pencak, "Warfare and Political Change in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts," in Peter Marshall and Glyn Williams, eds., The British Atlantic Empire before the American Revolution (Totowa, N.J., 1980), 65-66; James Kirby Martin and Mark Edward Lender, A Respectable Army: The Military Origins of the Republic, 7763-7789 (Arlington Heights, 111., 1982), 18-19. Most generalizations about the social composition of 18thcentury American military forces have been based on studies of the membership of units in the Continental army; see especially Edward C. Papenfuse and Gregory A. Stiverson, "General Smallwood's Recruits: The Peacetime Career of the Revolutionary War Private," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XXX (1973), 117-132; John R. Sellers, "The Common Soldier

28 Contexts of War Massachusetts soldiers of the Seven Years' War, in contrast, were by no means colonial proletarians. Rather, they were products of a society and economy that constantly generated males who were temporarily available for military service. To understand how and why civilians became provincials, one must first comprehend the place and role of young men in the Bay Colony. Their position depended on two facts of overwhelming consequence: the province's economy was dominated by noncommercial family agriculture, and its population was growing with astonishing speed. I

Nearly a quarter-million people lived in the Bay Colony when the Seven Years' War began, and the great majority of them made their homes on family farms. A small fraction—an eighth or a tenth—of the colonists resided in towns in which the majority of the householders supported themselves by some means other than farming. Only in such comparatively urban settings as Boston, Salem, the port section of Newbury, Gloucester, Charlestown, and perhaps Marblehead or Beverly did money circulate regularly. In most of the province's farming communities economic life proceeded along different lines and depended less on the direct exchange of currency. This is not to say, however, that the province was made up of individually self-sufficient family farms, each of which produced what its occupants needed for food, fuel, and clothing. Such farms, a persistent ideal in America's folk memory, may have existed somewhere, but not in eighteenth-century Massachusetts. The locus of subsistence production in the Bay Colony instead was in the farm town as a whole.4 Local systems of exchange allowed families on farms that were not individually selfsufficient to produce goods and services in enough quantity and variety to make economic life possible within towns or parishes. As we shall see, these arrangements depended heavily upon the participation of young men. Massachusetts' inability to produce any substantial staple crop was responsible for the predominance of town-based local exchange systems in in the American Revolution," in Stanley J. Underdal, ed., Military History of the American Revolution: The Proceedings of the Sixth Military History Symposium, United States Air Force Academy, lO-llOctober 1974 (Washington, D.C., 1976), 151-156, 164-166; Mark Edward Lender, "The Social Structure of the New Jersey Brigade: The Continental Line as an American Standing Army," in Peter Karsten, ed., The Military in America: From the Colonial Era to the Present (New York, 1980), 27-44. 4. Bettye Hobbs Pruitt, "Agriculture and Society in the Towns of Massachusetts, 1771: A Statistical Analysis" (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1981), 7-21, 25-40; and Pruitt, "SelfSufficiency and the Agricultural Economy of Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts," MS, Charles Warren Center, Harvard University, March 1983.

Army and Society 29 the provincial economy. The middle colonies might export flour and pork, and the southern colonies could sell their rice and tobacco overseas, but New England grew or manufactured no great commodity for markets abroad. Instead, Massachusetts produced goods (including rum, fish, ships, and livestock) and services (especially in maritime transport) that created the chance for widespread, though for most people infrequent, participation in markets outside their own communities. Almost every place in the province could produce something salable if the demand existed. But demand was seldom intense enough to permit many Bay colonists to specialize in the production of goods for the market. Among the country folk who composed the bulk of the population, almost everyone had some contact with commercial activity, both through the sale of occasional surpluses and in the purchase of items, like pins, gunpowder, and high-grade cloth, which could not be produced by local artisans. In comparison with the much more frequent exchanges of goods and labor within individual towns, however, such extralocal transactions were rare. In the more commonplace intracommunity exchanges cash seldom changed hands, and countrymen had to rely on credit for their daily economic activity.5 In this they were not unlike urban merchants who also operated principally on credit in their relations with corresponding firms and retailers. But the small scale and rural setting of local exchange systems gave credit within them a different meaning than it carried in the world of business. With no formal financial institutions to centralize them, local credit transactions took the form of debts contracted between individual community members. Such debts were precisely figured in terms of monetary equivalents according to accepted standards of value, and recorded as so many pounds, shillings, and pence owed "by" or "to" one's fellow townsmen. Within any given community, thousands of small obligations, carefully set down in scores of ledgers and pocket notebooks, reflected the complex interchanges of pasturage for household products, of stud service for farm labor, of virtually anything useful for whatever could be had in local goods and services. The resulting webwork of debts (which normally carried interest only if they involved the transfer of that rare commodity, cash) thus represented a formalization of family interdependence within communities. Local debts were always legally collectible, but in practice were carried on for years between families and individuals before they were reckoned and settled. Labor was the item most frequently exchanged on the local level, and this made young men crucial to the functioning of town economies. The 5. Christopher M. Jedrey, The World of John Cleaveland: Family and Community in Eighteenth-Century New England (New York, 1979), chap. 3.

3O Contexts of War demand for labor in preindustrial agricultural communities was heavy, but sporadic; the number of workers within individual families was not constant, nor were their skills necessarily suited to all their families' needs. The presence in the community of young men with strong backs and diverse abilities, who could be hired when extra hands were needed for clearing fields, plowing, harvesting, or for other tasks, gave farmers flexibility and reasonable efficiency in running their farms. Labor often functioned as a virtual proxy for currency in the local economy, and individual debts often represented work contracts—promises to deliver productive effort at the future point when it would be required. Any rural householder at any given time would owe and be owed by dozens of his neighbors. Moreover, few men possessed liquid assets sufficient to settle all, or even many, of their debts on demand. Participants in village exchange systems thus were never, technically speaking, far from insolvency. For them, economic survival meant not being called on to settle their obligations frequently (or worst of all, unexpectedly). The way to succeed within these cash-starved town economies was not to get ahead, but to be a patient creditor and a faithful debtor—the kind of good neighbor who would provide necessary commodities or labor when called upon, and not the sort of man who would increase his estate at his townsmen's expense. When creditors were of markedly greater wealth and community standing than their debtors, the interactions between them tended to take the form of patron-client relationships, promoting what we now identify as deferential social behavior. When creditors and debtors were more nearly equal in status and wealth, their mutual indebtedness could act as a powerful social cement, creating what we in retrospect see as communal cooperation. In rural Massachusetts either circumstance discouraged individualism and open acquisitiveness and, instead, reinforced the models of neighborly behavior countrymen heard expounded from their local pulpits. But this is emphatically not to say that the participants in rural town economies were less calculating than their urban cousins or that they were unworthy of their reputation for Yankee shrewdness. Far from inhabiting bucolic Utopias, country folk lived in communities in which economic opportunity was severely circumscribed. Precisely because their prospects were so limited, they had to think hard about their present and future estate, reckon their accounts closely, and plan ahead. The operation of local exchange networks can be observed in the account books of men like James Emery, a yeoman of Biddeford, in the "Eastward Part" of Massachusetts, Maine.6 From 1763, when he opened 6. James Emery Account Book, Agriculture MSS, Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Boston.

Army and Society 31 his ledger as a new household head, until his son closed it after his death in 1810, Emery kept accounts with seventy-five of his townsmen. James Emery was by no means unenterprising, nor was his town a backwater, untouched by the market: by 1770 he was engaging in small-scale trading ventures to the West Indies on the sloop Mayflower, in which he owned5 one-quarter interest. Such ventures remained only a small part of his total dealings, however, and the great majority of the transactions recorded in his account book involved only the exchange of local labor and goods produced in town. Emery's accounts with two of his neighbors show the dynamics of a local exchange economy at the most fundamental level. Emery's account with Robert Cole ran from 1768 through 1776, and during that period was reckoned twice: on 2 August 1769, when Cole owed £2 8s. 6d. Old Tenor to Emery, and again on 14 March, 1776, by which time Cole's debt had grown to £2 195. Old Tenor. These sums were only the artifacts of a long history of exchanges. Between the beginning of their cooperation and the first reckoning of the account, Emery supplied Cole with shoe leather, molasses, two felt hats, seventy-nine yards of home-woven cloth, a small amount of Indian corn, four and a half days of labor, and three days' use of his ox team: total value, £27 i6s. Old Tenor. Cole earned his credit with Emery largely by supplying him with labor. Cole's sons worked thirty-two days on Emery's farm, and Cole himself worked two days during the period before the first reckoning. In addition, Cole hired his ox team to Emery for two and a half days and provided him with sixteen skeins of homespun yarn, three pounds of butter, and a few pints of corn. This arrangement made eminent sense, since Emery's trading ventures on the Mayflower and his weaving skills allowed him to barter what he had a surplus of—goods of his own making and manufactured wares obtained outside Biddeford—for what he lacked: help on the farm. Emery would not begin to record hiring out his own sons' labor until 1774, and it is clear that in 1768-1769 Emery saw Cole's most desirable assets as his boys, who could help make up Emery's labor deficit. Over the eight years their account ran, each accumulated more than £75 of credit in Old Tenor value with the other, but in all that time, currency changed hands only twice. In the fall of 1773, Cole paid Emery £2 8s. in cash; a little over a year later, Emery delivered £2 55. in cash to Cole. In Cole's dealings with Emery, labor (provided mainly by Cole's sons) accounted for 75.2 percent of the credit he earned. Hiring his draft animals and farm equipment to Emery accounted for 12.3 percent, payment in kind for another j.i percent, and payment in currency for 3.2 percent, of Cole's total credit. (The remainder of Cole's credit was earned in unspecified transactions.) Labor was also the principal item by which Emery gained his counterbalancing credit with Cole, although it provided a smaller proportion, amounting to 39.7 percent of the total earned between 1769 and

32 Contexts of War 1776. Payments in kind and the hire of oxen and equipment made up 26.3 percent and 28.4 percent of Emery's credit, and only 4.4 percent of the total came from payment in currency. (The remainder was earned in unspecified exchanges.) The account of James Emery and Matthew Kissick ran for a much longer time, never involved the exchange of cash, and was reckoned for the last time nearly a decade after the final transaction occurred. Between 1766 and 1782, Emery (and eventually his sons) worked for Kissick in a variety of jobs, from general labor to shearing sheep, and from hewing timber to repairing his plow and cart. In addition, Emery and his sons worked on Kissick's behalf for a third party, John Davis, with whom Kissick had another account; Emery also supplied Kissick with goods and hired out his oxen and equipment. In return, Kissick made and repaired chairs for Emery, hauled his dung, framed his barn, repaired his milk house, built him a pair of doors, and sent his sons to work on Emery's farm. Emery earned credit with Kissick mainly by supplying him with labor (77.3 percent of the total value of his account), followed by payments in kind (10.4 percent), the rental of draft animals and farm equipment (6.7 percent), and unspecified transactions (5.6 percent). Kissick gained his offsetting credit with Emery by supplying labor and by sending his sons to work for him (87.7 percent of the value of his account) and by making payments in kind (12.3 percent). The two men first reckoned accounts in December 1768 and found that Emery owed Kissick 95. The sum was not collected, but carried over as a credit on the new account they immediately began. Their next reckoning was made on 22 March 1792, just short of nine years after Emery had delivered Kissick two hundredweight of hay in their last recorded transaction. After nineteen years of mutual indebtedness, Kissick finally owed Emery £i 175. in Massachusetts currency. It is probable, though by no means certain, that a cash payment settled their account at that point. If so, it was the first time that cash had changed hands between them. It is clear from such cases as these that the labor of young men was indispensable in the operation of the hardscrabble farm economies of Massachusetts towns, but that alone did not guarantee them a permanent place in their hometowns. The average rate of population growth in the eighteenth-century Bay Colony was about 2.5 percent per year, enough to double its population every twenty-eight years. Farmland was a fixed commodity in the long-settled eastern towns where most people lived, however, and by mid-century this meant that most families could not settle all their sons within the boundaries of their birthplaces. Depending on the quality of the land, farms usually could not be divided into holdings smaller than forty or fifty acres; the executors of intestate estates in the

Army and Society 33 period would generally refrain from splitting a farm into pieces smaller than that for fear of "spoiling the whole."7 Thus the head of a family with four sons living on, say, ninety acres, faced a difficult decision when the time came to settle his estate. He could divide the land equally between his sons; in so doing, however, he would condemn each of them to a lower standard of living then he had previously known, perhaps dooming them all to poverty.8 He might, on the other hand, settle all his land on a single heir, ensuring that the family line would not decline in wealth; but what then of his other children? By the middle of the eighteenth century fathers were tending to resolve such dilemmas by giving each son at least some land, while fixing on one or two principal heirs (determined in most cases by their positions in the birth order), in order to preserve the integrity of the estate.9 The sons not favored with land enough for fanning received the bulk of their portions in other forms: help in purchasing land elsewhere, cash, tools, a liberal education, and so on, in degrees determined by the financial condition of the family.10 Sons who inherited more land were often given obligations to fulfill in completing the portions of their siblings, engagements that might take years to complete." However a family's estate might be divided, sons knew that the division would take place only when their father was ready to settle, or when he died. Until they received their portions, young men generally lacked the resources to set themselves up independently, marry, and begin their own households. Consequently, for most male youths the period from their middle teens to their middle twenties was a time of prolonged dependence—a kind of prelude to real manhood. This was also the point in their lives at which they were capable of contributing the most to the economic welfare of their families of origin. As one historian of the family in this period has observed, it was the labor of sons that allowed families to prosper: "The ten years of work between a young man's sixteenth birthday and the mean statistical marriage age of twenty-six made an important contribution to his father's wherewithal" and was therefore a major factor in enabling the father to provide adequate portions for all his sons and daugh7. Jedrey, Cleaveland, 82. 8. John J. Waters, "Family, Inheritance, and Migration in Colonial New England: The Evidence from Guilford, Connecticut," WMQ, 3d Ser., XXXIX (1982), 82-83; Jedrey, Cleaveland, 81-82. 9. Jedrey, Cleaveland, 83-84; Waters, "Family, Inheritance," WMQ, 3d Ser., XXXIX (1982), 78-85; Philip J. Greven, Jr., Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, N.Y., 1970), 227-228. 10. Greven, Four Generations, 227-254 (land); 158-160, 243, 246, 251-253 (trade); 143, 166-167, 243-244 (cash); 243-244, 251-253 (education). See also Jedrey, Cleaveland, 74-84. 11. Jedrey, Cleaveland, 90-94.

34 Contexts of War ters.12 This point can hardly be overemphasized. Whatever tensions an extended period of dependence generated, it was indispensable to the functioning of the family economy.13 Without the greater income generated by the labor of the children as they became young adults, there was no guarantee that a family's offspring would ever achieve independence. Lacking land or trades or marriage portions, they might simply be absorbed into other households as servants or be forced to eke out precarious existences as permanent wage laborers. Because the interests of fathers and sons were both interdependent and opposed in this matter, as the fathers sought to build up the family holdings and the sons yearned to establish themselves as adults, young men during the dependency period worked not only for their familes but for themselves as well. The typical pattern seems to have been for youths to work primarily for the family in their teens, and increasingly for themselves as they grew into their twenties. The years before marriage, then, were years of work and saving, as young men (especially those who knew that they would not become their fathers' principal heirs) sought to accumulate the stake that, supplemented by parental aid, would allow them to start their own households. A major consequence of such family behavior was the perennial production of surplus males, young men who had not yet acquired enough property to marry and settle down as householders. Such youths lived at home or remained nearby, worked for their fathers or hired out for wages, held most of the small estates on their towns' tax lists, and generally owned little real property.14 But while they were undeniably poor and did represent a kind of surplus population, they were neither permanently poor nor 12. Waters, "Family, Inheritance," WMQ, 3d Ser., XXXIX (1982), 77. See also Greven, Four Generations, 206; Patricia J. Tracy, Jonathan Edwards, Pastor: Religion and Society in Eighteenth-Century Northampton (New York, 1980), 237-238, n. 27; Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York, 1976), 210-211, n. 22; Kenneth A. Lockridge, "The Population of Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636-1736," Economic History Review, 2d Ser., XIX (1966), 330; Daniel Scott Smith, "The Demographic History of Colonial New England," in Michael Gordon, ed., The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective (New York, 1973), 406. 13. Tracy, Edwards, passim; Greven, Four Generations, 222-258. 14. John J. Waters, "Patrimony, Succession, and Social Stability: Guilford, Connecticut in the Eighteenth Century," Perspectives in American History, X (1976), 156; Gross, Minutemen, 207-209, n. 16; Jedrey, Cleaveland, 94, 204, n. 80. Social standing peaked only when men reached their 405 and 505; see Waters, "Patrimony, Succession," 158; Jedrey, Cleaveland, 63-64,94; James A. Henretta, "Families and Farms: Mentalitein Pre-Industrial America," WMQ, 3d Sen, XXXV (1978), 20; Jackson Turner Main, "The Distribution of Property in Colonial Connecticut," in James Kirby Martin, ed., The Human Dimensions of Nation Making (Madison, Wise., 1976), 54-104, esp. 61-64. F°r a g°°d example of youth-related poverty, see the case of Jonathan, Daniel, and David Chandler of Andover, described in Greven, Four Generations, 251-253.

Army and Society 35 permanently surplus: they were in no sense members of an agricultural proletariat. Permanently poor people did exist in late-colonial Massachusetts, of course, in numbers that apparently increased during the eighteenth century. Although we know comparatively little about these people, we may be sure that local villagers did not regard them in the same light as the young men we have been discussing—even though they were equally bereft of property. The difference was that the young men were in expectation of some inheritance, a condition that would have been well known in any small town. While we cannot determine their relative numbers exactly, we do know that the permanent poor were far fewer than the population of temporarily poor young men and that age would have been a major factor in differentiating the two groups." Age was in fact one of the most reliable determinants of economic and social standing among New Englanders. For most men in the Bay Colony, landlessness was a function of either youth or old age.16 Between marriage, in their mid- to late twenties, and retirement or death in their late sixties or seventies, farmers usually saw the amount of wealth they controlled rise in a curve that peaked when they were in their fifties and then slowly decline as they distributed more and more property among their offspring in the form of dowries and inheritance portions. Since the process of inheritance was often not complete until after the death of one's father, many men did not attain full standing in their communities until they were in their forties. Men seldom exercised local political leadership until they had reached middle life and the fullness of means that was associated with it. It was assumed that only those who had established a stake in society, whose property in principle ensured that their interest was at the command of no man, could be relied upon to direct the life of the community wisely. Thus "a dependent son [no matter what his age] could not be a leader, any more than . . . a servant could be a voter." " The men who were called the "fathers of the towns" were literally that. Younger men waited their turn— 15. Douglas Lamar Jones, "The Strolling Poor: Transiency in Eighteenth-Century Mas sachusetts," Journal of Social History, VIII (Spring 1975), 28; Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 184-185. For comparative size of the permanently impoverished population and the youthful poor in Essex County, see estimates in Fred Anderson, "War and the Bay Colony: Soldiers and Society in Massachusetts during the Seven Years' War, 1754-1763" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1981), II, 419-420. During the period of highest vagabondage in Essex County, 1760-1764, the number of vagrants (male, female, and children) was about 862, according to Jones, "Strolling Poor," Jour. Soc. Hist., VIII (Spring 1975), 35; at the same time, the Essex County total of men in the dependency agerange, 16-26, was about 4,100. 16. Jedrey, Cleaveland, 63-70. 17. Ibid., 121.

36 Contexts of War for independence, for wealth, for leadership—not because they particularly wanted to do so, but because the strict limitations of opportunity in the hardscrabble farming economy of most towns left them no alternative. While the young men of Massachusetts waited to assume the prerogatives and responsibilities of adulthood, they pursued occupations that varied according to choices their fathers had made for them while they were still children and according to the opportunities that were locally available. They could, in effect, enter three lines of work: farming, artisanship, and laboring. The first required land, either rented or owned; the second implied the acquisition of a skill and the ownership of tools; the third meant working for a wage, either as a day-laborer or a servant. Farming required the greatest outlay, conferred the most in terms of independence and community standing, and represented the goal for which most men were compelled to wait and save. Artisanship necessitated a lower level of capital expenditure—time spent as an apprentice was the biggest investment —but it meant a greater degree of dependence for young practitioners who lacked the resources to set up their own shops. Such journeymen, if they were not wholly itinerant, might well find themselves working for a master and earning wages not much higher than those of laborers. Laboring required only a strong back; while carrying no stigma, it offered the least in terms of independence, compensation, and respectability.18 In pursuing any of these livelihoods, young men were not necessarily following fixed careers. Colonial farmers often practiced trades in addition to farming; artisans might inherit or purchase enough land to make most of their living from it and begin to style themselves "yeomen"; laborers might save enough to buy a patch of ground, rent some more, and purchase a few cattle, thus becoming husbandmen. Even country pastors were usually also farmers, tending flocks both spiritual and woolly. It is thus most accurate to think of any young man who was not yet fully established as being only a temporary member of whatever occupational group he might claim." Great variations in population density reflected equally great disparities in the occupational opportunities open to young men in different parts of Massachusetts. The most populous part of the province was the region that had been settled by the Puritans during the Great Migration of the 16305—the original Bay Colony, consisting in the eighteenth century of the counties of Essex, Middlesex, and Suffolk. Mean population density there at the time of the Seven Years' War was on the order of sixty persons 18. For discussion of occupational patterns among young men in Massachusetts, see Fred Anderson, "A People's Army: Provincial Military Service in Massachusetts during the Seven Years' War," WMQ, 3d Ser., XL (1983), 499-527. See also "War and the Bay Colony," I, 50; II, 420-421. 19. Jedrey, Cleaveland, 64, 66-68.

Army and Society 37 per square mile, distributed in the familiar nucleated pattern of New England towns. The three counties to their south, Plymouth, Bristol, and Barnstable, had roughly half the density of the Bay area, about thirty persons per square mile. Until 1692 these counties had been a separate entity, the Colony of New Plymouth, which was first settled a decade before the Great Migration. Locally they were still referred to as the Old Colony, and they had retained a distinct regional complexion. They had grown from a smaller initial population base, had not yet developed an urban center, and were made up of towns settled in a more dispersed pattern than those of the Bay. The counties of Worcester and Hampshire were Massachusetts' western frontier and had on average fewer than fifteen persons per square mile. The dozen settlements of York County, or Maine, comprised the province's other frontier. In mean population density, these maritime towns "to the Eastward" fell squarely between the western frontier towns and those of the Old Colony. The main occupation of household heads in all of these regions was, of course, farming. But for young men who typically were not yet householders, the variations in settlement pattern and population density meant substantial differences in the kinds of employment that were available.20 Each of the three principal kinds of livelihood—in farming, artisanship, and laboring—was strongly identifed with young men's occupational opportunities in a specific region of the province. Only in the western counties was land available in sufficient quantities to make farming the predominant occupation of young men. Those who lived in the Bay Colony counties, amid dense population and nucleated settlements, were most likely to make their way as artisans, particularly in trades based on wood, leather, and cloth. For the young men of the Old Colony, as for those of Maine, long-occupied areas of dispersed settlement, employment centered on agricultural labor. Despite these variations in the kinds of occupation accessible to young men in the different parts of the province, however, the actual level of economic opportunity was roughly comparable from region to region. Migration offers an index to the availability of employment: men who can find no work near home will seek jobs further afield, in areas where they can earn their livings. Among more than two thousand Massachusetts-born provincials on the Crown Point expedition in 1756, about three men out of five, regardless of whether they were natives of the populous east or the undersettled west, had stayed within the precincts of their birthplaces until enlistment (an event which for most occurred in their late teens and twenties). The province-wide consistency in the proportion of men re20. See Anderson, "A People's Army," WMQ, 3d Ser., XL (1983), 510-513; "War and the Bay Colony," I, 51-69; II, 421-433.

38 Contexts of War maining in their birthplaces versus those leaving them indicates that the migrants were not moving to flee from untenable economic circumstances. For most young men in Massachusetts, choosing to move away from home or to remain, like settling upon a livelihood, represented a reasonable response to local, structural variations in economic opportunity. The Seven Years' War, with its massive demand for soldiers, brought another kind of variation in opportunity, a temporal one. In its ordinary operation, the province's rural economy was given shape and movement by the decisions of thousands of families trying to perpetuate family lines by "distributing scarce resources from one generation to the next" in accordance with custom and common sense.21 The actions of young men in entering occupations, in moving or staying put, were largely governed by parental decisions that they themselves could begin to influence only as they grew into their twenties. Parents' decisions, in turn, were intended to enable the rising generation to achieve independence for itself—gradually—and, in its turn, to care for the dependent elderly, thus sustaining and replicating the family-centered social order. This complex, infinitely varied set of family strategies achieved something like a dynamic equilibrium between a burgeoning population and the colony's available resources. For young men, the price of this equilibrium was prolonged dependence—a stage that most, undoubtedly, hoped would end quickly. One could hasten that end by gathering enough capital to start out with a minimum of parental help. And one way of accumulating such a stake, in the years between 1754 and 1763, was through provincial military service. Although a young man contemplating enlistment could hardly expect to become rich, service in the provincial forces did confer financial benefits. In the first place, military duty (unlike civilian labor) was steady work, for which a man would be paid from enlistment until discharge, a period that usually lasted six to eight months. The provincial private's pay was high by eighteenth-century military standards—about twice as high as a redcoat private's net earnings—and was comparable to a civilian laborer's. A provincial private in 1756 received £i 125. in provincial currency per month, plus subsistence officially valued at 8d. per day.22 Thus the private's wage, "all found" (that is, the wage including food and lodging) was worth 525. Lawful Money per month, the equivalent of a 2s. daily laborer's wage paid for each of the twenty-six working days in the same period.23 In the years after 1756, the private's wage rose to £i i6s. all found, 21. Jedrey, Cleaveland, 70. 22. The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay, XV (Boston, 1908), 442, 454-455, hereafter cited as Acts and Resolves. 23. William B. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England (New York, 1963 [orig. publ., 1890]), II, 896-898, gives the agricultural laborer's wage as 145.-l6s. Old Tenor per day, a sum equivalent to is. i id.-2s. 2d. Lawful Money.

Army and Society 39 or the equivalent of 2s. for each of the working days and is. for each Sabbath. Additionally, the province compensated its soldiers for enlistment by a bounty amounting at least to an additional month's pay and at most to a full eight months' pay. In 1756, a year with a comparatively low bounty, the minimum offered was an extra £i i6s. plus a blanket valued at 125. The cash compensation for the average private soldier on that year's Crown Point expedition, then, was more than £15 Lawful Money. The pay increased above that in every subsequent year of the war and eventually almost doubled.24 Moreover, provincial soldiers received their wages at the end of their enlistments, an arrangement that forced the soldier to save and gave him access to relatively large sums of cash, that scarcest of the countryside's resources. Fifteen pounds would not buy a farm, but it was a good start. In Andover in that period it would pay for 15 to 30 acres of unbroken land, and in Northampton it would buy as much as 150 acres of unimproved upland.25 From the private's perspective, military service was a reasonably lucrative proposition, providing cash income to hasten his attainment of independence. Although service inevitably brought danger, privation, hard work, and exposure to the elements, none but the first of these was far removed from his civilian experience. As recruiters undoubtedly assured potential soldiers, the army also offered the opportunity for plunder and adventure. Military service meant, moreover, a chance to see a different part of North America and to participate in the struggle against New England's historic antagonists, the papist French and the barbarous Indians. If the life of the average young New Englander was largely a waiting game, military service promised both a change from the accustomed routines and perhaps an accelerated entry into real manhood. II

The provincial recruiting process was never so unpopular or disreputable as that of the redcoats. Regular-army recruiting before the arrival of Lord Loudoun as commander in chief in July 1756 was unregulated and characterized by abuses—enlistment under false pretenses, the intoxication and kidnapping of men—that deeply antagonized New Englanders.26 Public 24. For wages and bounties of private soldiers in the Massachusetts provincial forces during the war, see Table I. 25. Land prices from Greven, Four Generations, 128-130, 224, 227; Tracy, Edwards, 16. Tracy's Old Tenor prices were recalculated in Lawful Money using the depreciation table in Nash, Urban Crucible, 405-406. 26. Stanley McCrory Pargellis, Lord Loudoun in North America (New Haven, Conn., 1933), 106-109.

40 Contexts of War revulsion at the regulars' methods complemented the attractions of higher provincial pay and brief terms of service to make the colonial recruiter's job immeasurably easier than that of his red-coated counterpart.27 In addition, the militia's regimental and company commanders cooperated by making local men aware of enlistment opportunities, which enabled provincial recruiting to be carried on more efficiently and economically than that of the regulars. The process worked as follows. Late each winter, usually in February, the governor of Massachusetts formally appointed the colonels who would command the province troops in the coming year's campaign. Along with his new or renewed colonel's commission, the governor sent each appointee a packet of blank commission forms for ensigns, lieutenants, and captains, to be distributed as he saw fit. The subordinate commands within his regiment would be assigned thereafter in accordance with the prospective officers' success in attracting men to the service. In 1755, for example, a captain was expected to enlist fifty men; a lieutenant, twenty-five; and an ensign, fifteen.28 Junior officers in turn made informal arrangements with prospective noncommissioned 27. The advantage of the provincial recruiter over his regular counterpart was a complex one, consisting not only in the greater appeal of the provincial armies but also in the provincials' greater ability to operate within community social structures and to secure the cooperation of local justices of the peace. An example helps illustrate this point. Early in 1759, Capt. Francis Legge of the 46th Regiment, recruiting near Boston, reported difficulties to General Amherst: I listed a man the other day who came voluntarily to my lodgings to enlist. I sent him before Justice [Richard] Dana of this town in order to have him sworn and attested, which the judge refused to do because the man had not been listed twenty-four hours. I have since found out that the justice's reason for not swearing the man was to give some people of the town who are employed to list for the provincials the opportunity to entice the man away from me; which they did and listed him for the provincials, first making him return the advance money I gave him and paying twenty shillings besides. [Legge to Jeffery Amherst, iSFeb. 1759, quoted in Norreys Jephson O'Conor, A Servant of the Crown in England and North America, 7756—67 (New York, 1938), 144-145] In this case Dana was availing himself of a technicality in the Mutiny Act, which governed enlistment. A man could renounce his initial agreement to serve if he did not make an attestation, in not less than 24 hours and not more than four days, before a justice of the peace, saying that he understood the terms of enlistment and that he had taken the oath of fidelity. Any recruit who declined to make the attestation, returned the money paid him by the enlisting officer (usually a guinea, or a pistole and a dollar), and paid a 20s. fine was free to go. (See Pargellis, Loudoun, 117, 123.) By preventing the man from making the attestation, Justice Dana had enabled the provincial recruiters to have a soldier for the price of paying his 2os. fine. From the British point of view, this was theft; the colonials probably thought it was cooperation in a humanitarian cause. 28. William Shirley to John Winslow, 12 Feb. 1755, "Journal of Colonel John Winslow . . . ," Nova Scotia Historical Society, Collections, IV (1884), 117. See also Ephraim Williams to John Burk, n Apr. 1755, MS in the John Burk Correspondence, French and Indian War Collection, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.

Army and Society 41 officers, promising sergeants' or corporals' billets in their companies in return for the enlistments of private soldiers.29 Along with the commissions, the governor dispatched an authorization for the colonel "to beat his drum anywhere within this province for enlisting volunteers in his majesty's service, in a regiment to be forthwith raised for the service and defense of his majesty's colonies in North America," in the coming campaign. These "beating orders" also instructed local militia commanders "not to give the [newly appointed colonel] any obstructions or molestations herein; but on the contrary to afford him all necessary encouragement and assistance, for which this is a sufficient warrant."30 Militia officers mainly encouraged and assisted in raising troops by ordering musters of their units, at which recruiters would appear and solicit enlistments. If an insufficient number of men proved willing to volunteer, the governor could make up the shortage in his province's quota under the provisions of "An Act for Levying Soldiers" (passed 1754), which empowered him to issue a general impressment order. Upon receiving such an order, each militia colonel would muster his regiment, and subordinate commanders would again ask for volunteers. If none emerged, the requisite number of men, in theory to be drawn from the idle elements of each town, would be conscripted into service. Law and custom permitted any "pressed man" to hire a substitute to go in his place, providing he paid a five-pound fine to the province. Those who hired replacements struck whatever bargain they could with the men who took their places. The going rate in 1756 was evidently about ten pounds Lawful Money; by 1759 it had increased to somewhere between fourteen and fifteen pounds.31 As this increase indicates, while some impressed men were indeed of the shiftless sort envisioned in the authorizing legislation, others were chosen from among the better-off elements in the community, simply because they could afford to pay for substitutes. Managed within the authority structures of Massachusetts villages by 29. See, e.g., the arrangements made between Job Winslow and David Perry, in Perry, "Recollections of an Old Soldier," Magazine of History, CXXXVII (1928), 20; and those between Rufus Putnam and Captain William Paige in Putnam, The Memoirs ofRufus Putnam (Boston, 1903), 32. Indirect evidence also exists in the diary of David Holdin, entry of i6Apr. 1760, "Journal of Sergeant Holden," Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, 2d Ser., IV (1889), 387-409. All citations of soldiers' diaries and orderly books hereafter will be made according to the form given in Appendix B, i.e., by diarist's name and date of entry. See also Ephraim Williams to John Burk, n Apr. 1755, Burk Correspondence. 30. William Shirley, beating order for John Winslow, 10 Feb. 1755, "Journal of Winslow," Nova Scotia Hist. Soc., Colls., IV (1884), 118. 31. "An Act for Levying Soldiers, and to Protect Soliders and Seamen From Being Arrested for Debt," passed 20 Apr. 1754: Acts and Resolves, HI, Pt. ii, 734-738, 808. See also Pargellis, Loudoun, 113. For Rufus Putnam's experience as a hired substitute, see his Memoirs, 25, n. i (a copy of a receipt dated 2 Apr. 1759).

42 Contexts of War leaders who knew a great deal about their townsmen's affairs, the process of impressment for the provincial armies differed widely from naval impressment, which amounted to the virtual abduction of merchant seamen. Militia officers instead conducted the land impress in such a way as to conscript the required number with a minimum of social strain. Any number of expedients, as varied as the communities in which impressment took place, were used to achieve this result. A typical method was to impress more men than the local quota required—a practice that allowed pressed men to share the expense of hiring the substitute and kept the burden within reasonable limits for those forced to contribute.32 This practice explains a cryptic entry in the diary of a provincial soldier, Joseph Nichols: March the 27th, 1758.1 'listed [in his] majesty's service against Canada, and myself to do a turn this year for Captain Belknap's two sons, viz., Samuel Howard and Jeremiah Belknap. Captain Jeremiah Belknap, Sr., commanded the Framingham militia company. He had responded to his colonel's call by impressing his son and his son-in-law, who pooled their resources and paid Nichols to serve their "turn."33 Belknap thus managed to handle impressment equitably—no one could accuse him of favoritism—while spreading the cost to keep from taxing either of the pressed men beyond his means. Such informal arrangements were so much a part of the fabric of local society and daily life that few recognizable documentary traces survive. Another important means of promoting enlistment, which has left somewhat more direct evidence, was the use of kinship connections to help secure recruits. A unique set of personnel records from 1756 preserves the names and ranks of 3,047 provincials in six Massachusetts regiments on the Crown Point expedition, and includes supplementary information on the ages, occupations, birthplaces, and residences of at least 70 percent of the soldiers as well. These lists reveal that surnames were very widely shared in the army: the 3,047 soldiers had only 1,443 family names among them. Men with the same last name, of course, were not necessarily relatives, but in 104 cases two or more men within the same company shared not only a surname but birthplace or residence at enlistment—a circumstance that much more strongly indicates family ties. Out of these 104 groups, 65 had a member (or two) who, as an officer or a noncommis32. Leach, Arms for Empire, 22-23. 33. On Belknap, see Nancy S. Voye, ed., Massachusetts Officers in the French and Indian Wars, 1748-1763 (Boston, 1975), entries 492-493. Joseph Nichols was no drifter, but an apparently promising (though poor) young man, recently married and evidently in need of money. In his journal, additional notes dated Mar. 1762 indicate that he kept school at Holliston following his service—a job for which he was paid 40$. per month, about the same rate he had earned as a clerk in the army during the 1758 campaign.

Army and Society 43 sioned officer, would have been active in raising the company.34 Typical of such groups were the three Coffins in Captain Jonathan Pearson's company, all from Newbury: the twenty-five-year-old Corporal Tristram and Privates Benjamin and Joseph, nineteen and twenty-one years old respectively. Typical, too, were the four Bullocks—a lieutenant, a sergeant, and two privates, all from Rehoboth—in Captain James House's company. Such cases afford strong evidence of kinship between the men, and enough instances exist in which men of higher and lower rank within the same companies were definitely related to confirm the instrumentality of kinship in recruitment. Sons enlisted under their fathers: Sergeant Joseph Clark of Mendon, for example, served with his seventeen-year-old son, Joseph Jr., in Captain Benjamin Thwing's company; Private Samuel Robinson, Jr., a seventeen-year-old man from Hardwick, served in the company his father commanded. Older brothers enlisted younger ones, uncles recruited nephews, and cousins signed up to serve under cousins. All three Boydens in Captain William Bacon's company were kinsmen: Ensign Elhanan Boyden of Walpole was the elder brother of Private Jonathan and the first cousin of Private Ebenezer, also of Walpole, and was evidently the officer who enlisted them. In Colonel Jonathan Bagley's company Corporal 34. Quantitative statements in this chapter are derived from my analysis of a unique set of "descriptive lists" (hereafter cited as Lists) made during the Crown Point expedition of 1756, now collected and bound as "Muster Rolls, 1755-1756," Vol.XCIV of the Massachusetts Archives, at the State House, Boston. These lists were mainly collected at Fort Edward and Fort William Henry by company clerks in late July and August. They record information including the name, age, birthplace, residence, civilian occupation, condition of service (voluntary, hired, or impressed), and rank of each man, along with other less consistently recorded data. This information exists in a fair state of completeness on approximately four out of every five soldiers in the six regiments Massachusetts fielded for the expedition. Although a number of descriptive lists were made later in the war, there was never another instance of such comprehensive coverage of the province's troops. In early Oct., as the campaign was drawing to a close, the provincial commander, Maj. Gen. John Winslow, directed that another set of rolls be drawn up. These were to record the physical condition of each soldier, by unit, rank, and name. These rolls and descriptive lists are a combination unique among the documents surviving from the Seven Years' War in Massachusetts. The descriptive lists contain sufficient data to reconstruct a social profile of the more than 3,000 men in the regiments of 1756. (For an extended treatment of this topic, see Anderson, "A People's Army.") The additional information on soldiers' physical condition permits a correlation of health and other factors, such as age and rank, and offers the opportunity to estimate the deadliness of wilderness campaigning to the soldier and to the army as a whole. (The health and welfare of the army are discussed at length in chap. 3, below.) My analysis of these lists was made with the aid of an IBM 370/168 computer, utilizing the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), Version 6, as described in Norman H. Nie et al., SPSS, zd ed. (New York, 1975). Coding and methodological concerns are discussed in "War and the Bay Colony," app. Ill, "Methods of Quantitative Analysis." With additions from other sources as noted, quantitative statements hereafter (including all tables) are based on the analyzed descriptive lists.

44 Contexts of War Moses Lowell, a forty-five-year-old yeoman from Amesbury, apparently enlisted three of his nephews—John, Gideon, and Eliphalet, all sons of his eldest brother.35 Genealogies make it possible to identify such straightforward cases of blood relationship, but patrilineal ties would by no means have been the only form of kinship instrumental in recruitment: in-law relationships and collateral connections between families of different names must have been no less influential. The process of enlistment thus created unusually close ties between the army's leaders and its rank and file—ties incomprehensible to regular soldiers like the redcoats, who understood that a virtually unbridgeable chasm separated officers from other ranks. Rather than being held together like the British army with draconian discipline in a system that discouraged officers from even learning their men's Christian names,36 the provincial regiments were in some measure bound by kinship ties. Such relationships both tended to diminish whatever awe an epaulet might inspire in a private's mind and to mitigate an officer's tendency to see himself as a different breed of human being from his subordinates. Other recruiting strategies further undermined the development of professionalism among the provincials. The growth of personal bonds during service and the undertaking of informal agreements relating to enlistment were central to the annual re-creation of the Massachusetts forces. Again, these were the sort of relationships and understandings likely to escape documentation, but two veterans' memoirs, written in the early nineteenth century, unmistakably show the process at work. In the spring of 1758, David Perry, a sixteen-year-old shoemaker's apprentice who had recently joined the Dighton militia company, attended a drill session on a day when "there were officers on the parade-ground, to enlist men for the next campaign."37 He signed on as a soldier in Colonel Jedediah Preble's regiment and saw service under Captain Job Winslow in the abortive Crown Point expedition. He liked soldiering enough to sign up again in 1759; this time he was recruited by a Dighton man, Lieutenant John Richmond. Perry expected, he wrote, "to join Capt. Nathan Rogers' company with the lads that enlisted with me." Lieutenant Richmond was 35. Source of information of Coffins, Bullocks, Clarks, and Robinsons: Lists. On the Boydens: Wallace Clarke Boyden et al., Thomas Boyden and His Descendants (Boston, 1901), 12-13, 20-21, 38-40. On the Lowells: Delmar Rial Lowell, The Historic Genealogy of the Lowells of America from 1639 to 1899 (Rutland, Vt., 1899), 312-313, 315, 318, 331. 36. See John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York, 1976), 186-187. Although Keegan writes specifically here of Wellington's army, he is describing a system of discipline that had existed a half-century earlier, probably in an even more intense form, among the redcoats in North America. See also below, chap. 4; and Frey, British Soldier, chap. 4, "Crimes and Courts." 37. Perry, "Recollections," Mag. Hist. CXXXVII (1928), 8.

Army and Society 45 unexpectedly transferred to another regiment, however, and this momentarily confused the situation. Richmond urged Perry to accompany him to the new assignment as his "waiter," or servant, promising that the young soldier would "live as well as he [the lieutenant] did." Captain Rogers, the company commander, refused to release Perry from his unit, and a vigorous wrangle resulted. The regiment's major finally settled the dispute by ruling that only Perry could decide with whom—Richmond or Rogers— he would serve. Perry chose Richmond, and on the way to Boston, where they were to embark on the Saint Lawrence expedition, the lieutenant proved "a[s] good as his word as to my fare," Perry recalled: "I rode his horse as much as he did, until we gained the company." ™ At the end of the 1759 campaign, at Halifax, Perry fell in again with Job Winslow, his previous year's captain, who had been promoted to major. Perry spent most of the winter with him, apparently acting as his servant. He returned home in February.39 Perry had been back at his trade only a month when Winslow contacted him with an offer: "If I would enlist what men I could, and go back to Halifax with him, I should have a sergeant's berth . . . ; and if no vacanc. occurred, I should be cleared from duty through the season." Perry soon collected "eight or ten likely young men"; but "there being no vacancy for a sergeant's berth, I lived with the Colonel, Major, and Chaplain of the regiment, and fared very well."40 In the fall of the year he returned once again to Dighton, where he remained until he completed his indenture. Perry served for the last time in 1762, when Job Winslow, by that time a lieutenant colonel, renewed the offer of a sergeant's billet. Once again Perry raised "a number of recruits" and marched them off to Boston. This time Winslow was able to make good on his offer, and Perry became a sergeant. In 1762 he saw action in Newfoundland, fell gravely ill, and barely survived. When he returned to Dighton for a long convalescence, he was not far past his twenty-first birthday.41 The most striking aspect of Perry's 1819 memoir, "Recollections of an Old Soldier," is the vividness of his memory, after six decades, of the promises made to him and of the precision with which those undertakings were fulfilled. By his account two commissioned officers made him three promises relating to recruitment. Fulfillment of two of the promises entailed fraternization between himself and his superiors—personal associations so close as to be unthinkable in any professional military force. Yet it is equally clear that such arrangements and the existence of close relations 38. 39. 40. 41.

Ibid., 12. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 22, 30.

46 Contexts of War across ranks were crucial both to the recruiting process and to the routine functioning of the army. Rufus Putnam's memoir of the war, written at about the same time as Perry's, offers further instructive examples, since it also turns on the themes of promise and fulfillment. Rufus Putnam first enlisted in 1757 at the age of nineteen. More ambitious than Perry, he wished to distinguish himself as a soldier and found great satisfaction in his promotion to sergeant in 1759, during his third tour of duty.42 Almost immediately thereafter, however, things began to go wrong. Because he had been trained as a millwright, Putnam was detached from his regiment to build a sawmill—an order he resented, since it would take him away from his sergeant's duties. He submitted to reassignment only when Timothy Ruggles, a provincial brigadier general, personally ordered him to do so. (Putnam finally complied, he wrote, because "the brigadier knew me very well, and I had known him for many years . . . ; nor did I like to offend an officer whom I so highly respected.") Putnam's skill so impressed the regular engineer supervising the mill construction that he offered Putnam a dollar a day (about four times his sergeant's salary) to stay on as the operator of the sawmill after the release of his regiment. When Putnam applied for his pay at the end of November, however, he was astonished to receive three dollars, rather than the thirty or so he had expected. He had understood that he was to earn a dollar a day from the time of his regiment's release, but the engineer instead insisted that he was entitled to be paid only for the three days he had served past the expiration of his enlistment.43 Putnam, feeling cheated, resolved "never to engage again as a soldier." He moved to New Braintree, where he had bought land, and set to work as a farmer.44 Putnam remained a civilian only until March 1760. At that point, Captain William Paige of Hardwick appeared with recruiting orders and a personal request from Brigadier Ruggles that Putnam raise troops for the coming campaign in return for a lieutenant's commission in Ruggles's regiment.45 Still stinging from his encounter with the British engineer, Putnam hesitated. He hesitated, too, because he knew that several of the "older settlers" in New Braintree had sought commissions in the regiment and had been refused. The rejected applicants "appeared very angry, and complained that the town was insulted by my appointment. Therefore," he thought, "I had very little reason to expect much success in recruiting among them." Soon, however, he found himself sought out by men who wished to serve under him and accepted the recruiting orders despite his 42. 43. 44. 45.

Putnam, Memoirs, 31. Ibid., 27, 28. Ibid., 31. Cf. ibid., 32, and Voye, ed., Officers, entries 4204-4206.

Army and Society 47 misgivings. He recruited a number of soldiers but unwisely allowed Paige to enlist them personally in his company. Paige was miserably ineffectual as a recruiter in his own right, but enjoyed an inestimable advantage in his lack of scruples. In order to preserve his claim to a captaincy, Paige took credit for enlisting the troops who thought they were signing on to serve under Putnam. When the troops discovered his action, it was "much to their disappointment," Putnam wrote; "arid to my own," he added, since "I was left to go a-begging."46 Brigadier Ruggles was in Boston and Putnam could find no one able to redress his grievance. Eventually another regimental commander, Colonel Abijah Willard, offered Putnam an ensign's commission, which he accepted. He tried to raise a few more men; "but," he recalled, "I had very little success, as might well be expected after what had taken place respecting the men I had enlisted." He came up with only three new recruits.47 Rufus Putnam set down these complicated disappointments in detail when he was an old man, following a distinguished career as a general officer in the War of Independence. He did it, he said, so that "all, but especially those unexperienced youth such as I was, [might] be cautioned how far they trust the friendship of those [in] whose interest it may be to dupe them."48 Putnam and Perry agreed that the system was supposed to be based on informal agreements and understandings. Both men's accounts indicate how thoroughly the operation of the provincial forces depended on personal contacts between officers (even officers of high rank) and enlisted men. In Putnam's case, however, the system failed to function according to expectation, and he brooded over the failure ever after. Putnam's decision to go to work on the sawmill depended on the intervention of a brigadier general, whom Putnam obeyed not because of his military authority, but because they had previously been acquainted and because Putnam personally respected Brigadier Ruggles. In the following year, despite his disillusionment, Putnam finally agreed to raise soldiers in large part because Ruggles specifically requested that he try. His hesitation demonstrates the extent to which recruiting depended on the recruiter's standing and reputation in the community. Putnam believed he would have little luck recruiting New Braintree men so long as the older settlers—the logical candidates for leading soldiers from the town—had not been recognized as leaders. The troops he initially enlisted understood that they would serve under him, since they were "much" disappointed to be mustered into Paige's company without Putnam as their lieutenant. It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of the recruits' personal 46. Putnam, Memoirs, 32-33. 47. Ibid., 33. 48. Ibid.

48 Contexts of War confidence in the man who persuaded them to enlist. After Putnam's original recruits suffered their "disappointment," he could find few men who were willing to risk following him, even though his position as an ensign was already formally secure. Their reluctance hardly surprised him. Putnam had lost face as well as recruits and knew very well that his reputation could no longer justify many recruits' confidence. For the common soldier, the decision to enlist was much more than merely agreeing to serve: it meant choosing a leader. We can understand the apparently erratic behavior of provincial armies in the field only by first recognizing that intense personal loyalties and expectations of reciprocity between men and officers suffused the process by which these armies were created. In its institutional ideal, a provincial army was a human pyramid, hierarchically organized and held together with chains of command, authority, and obligation, extending from the commander in chief at its peak down to the individual soldiers at its base. But the reality of recruitment gave the lie to the superficial orderliness of the provincial armies' organization. Rather than a uniform hierarchy of officers and men, a provincial army was in fact a confederation of tiny war bands, bound together less by the formal relationships of command than by an organic network of kinship and personal loyalties. Ill

Only once during the war did a provincial general order the collection of a large body of information on the personnel under his command. In late July 1756, at Fort William Henry, Major General John Winslow had the clerks in his six Massachusetts regiments compile "descriptive lists" of each unit, recording data that could be used to identify deserters.49 The result was, in effect, a census which affords two valuable opportunities. First, it provides a unique organizational snapshot of the Massachusetts provincial army, not in the ideal form envisioned in its authorizing legislation, but as it was realized in the field. Second, it permits an analysis of the social composition of the army, a glimpse into the civilian backgrounds of the great majority of its three thousand—plus soldiers. In its formal organization the provincial army represented a scaleddown copy of the British regular establishment. Its fundamental component was the company, a unit of forty to one hundred men, led by three commissioned officers (a captain assisted by a lieutenant and an ensign) and seven noncommissioned officers (three sergeants and four corporals). 49. "Muster Rolls," Massachusetts Archives, XCIV.

Army and Society 49 Ten companies made up a battalion, the basic tactical unit of the army. The army's principal administrative echelon was the regiment, which could consist of from one to four battalions. The Massachusetts regiments under Winslow's command had only one battalion each. Just as the company was commanded by three "company officers," the regiment was headed by three "field officers"—a colonel, a lieutenant colonel, and a major. Besides the three field and thirty company officers who together constituted its "line officers," each regiment had a six-member "staff" to perform administrative functions. Staff officers included the adjutant, who supervised personnel matters; the commissary and the quartermaster, who were responsible for the acquisition, storage, and distribution of food and materiel; the chaplain; and the surgeon and surgeon's mate. (An armorer and armorer's mate were also attached to the staff, but were regarded as technicians rather than officers.) In total strength a single-battalion regiment might range from four hundred to a thousand men, plus officers. As in everything else relating to provincial military organization, there was considerable disparity between the intention and its realization. The six Massachusetts regiments in 1756 should have totaled sixty companies; instead, there were fifty-six. Only two regiments had their full complement of ten companies; the rest had nine apiece.50 According to the authorizing legislation the 1756 provincial companies were supposed to have thirty-eight "centinels," or private soldiers, plus a drummer and a clerk.51 The actual composition of the units varied greatly, but over the course of the campaign each company averaged fifty-four men, including replacements.52 Of this number, approximately twenty-five or thirty were present and on duty at any given time; only rarely would as many as forty men be on hand and fit for service in a typical company. Nor were all companies led by captains. As a traditional perquisite the three field officers of each regiment also commanded their unit's first three com50. For regiments that the army comprised and their strengths, see Table 2. 51. The ideal strengths of provincial units and the complements of men at each rank can be inferred from information in the acts by which money was appropriated for the provincial establishment: in this case, Acts and Resolves, XV, 311-312, which stipulates one captain for each 5O-man company and one colonel for each joo-man regiment. Subtracting the 3 officers, 7 noncommissioned officers, the drummer, and the clerk of each company gives an expected centinel strength for each company of 38 in the army of 1756. 52. By 11 and 12 Oct., according to the lists, 366 replacments had arrived; as many as 500 were dispatched from Boston. See Loudoun to the duke of Cumberland, 3 Oct. 1756, in Stanley Pargellis, ed., Military Affairs in North America, 1748-1765 (Hamden, Conn., 1969; [orig. publ., New York, 1936]), 240—241; and Shirley to Loudoun, 23 Aug. 1756, Loudoun Papers, LO1563, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. Hereafter material from the Loudoun Papers will be identified by date and LO document number; quoted material from the Loudoun Papers appears by permission of the Huntington Library.

50 Contexts of War panies, in which case each company was assigned an extra lieutenant (called a captain-lieutenant or a first lieutenant) who performed the actual tasks of command. The net effect of this practice was to swell the number of lieutenants above the authorized level and to funnel some extra pay into the pockets of the field officers. One of the provincial regiments of 1756—the one commanded by Colonej Richard Gridley of Boston—departed from the organization stipulated by the General Court in having an artillery train attached. This unique unit, twice the size of a normal company, was commanded by Gridley himself, aided by seven lieutenants (among whom was Paul Revere). Its enlisted personnel consisted of matrosses, privates who sponged the cannon bores, rammed the charges, and positioned the guns; gunners, specialists who aimed and fired the pieces; and another set of specialists called bombardiers, who served the train's mortars. With the exception of the members of the train, all the Massachusetts provincials in 1756 were infantrymen. The provincial establishment thus lacked not only the size but also the complexity of the British army; there were no functionally specialized units such as cavalry, grenadiers, dragoons, or light infantry.53 The province's single-battalion regiments were never brigaded together, and its officer corps consequently lacked both brigadiers and brigade-majors. The only general officer among the Massachusetts provincials in 1756 was their commander in chief, Major General John Winslow, who was compelled to command his colonels directly, without even the assistance of aides-de-camp. In the later years of the conflict, Massachusetts' provincial forces did become somewhat more complex. Two brigadier generals (Timothy Ruggles and Jedediah Preble) eventually commanded regiments made up of two battalions each, and a lightinfantry battalion was organized under Lieutenant Colonel Oliver Partridge in 1758. But despite a passing resemblance, provincial forces never managed to do more than mimic the regulars. In their functioning, as in their recruitment, great disparities persisted between the ideal and the actual. One of the most important differences beween regular and irregular organizations was that the provincial army was never a permanent body. An officer corps was freshly commissioned every year and raised new troops to fill the army's units. Men enlisted not for a term of years or for the duration of the war, but for a campaign that they understood would last eight months. By law, none of the enlisted men could be compelled to serve longer than twelve months. Service was further limited by explicit statements built into commissions and enlistment agreements. In 1756, for ex53. For a numerical breakdown of the army of 1756 by rank, see Table 3.

Army and Society 51 ample, the men enlisted specifically in, and officers were commissioned explicitly for, "an expedition against Crown Point whereof John Winslow, Esquire, is commander in chief."54 Both soldiers and governments took the limitations on service implied or expressed by such agreements seriously.55 While soldiers might reenlist (and often did) and officers might be recommissioned (and often were) from year to year, the provincial army itself was perennially a new creation. Any continuity it enjoyed was accidental. The General Court recognized the hazard and the inefficiency of annually fielding forces that were largely composed of inexperienced troops. In the later years of the war it tried to remedy the problem by offering increasingly larger bounties to induce reenlistment. The very growth of these bounties, which eventually surpassed the equivalent of a year's salary for a centinel, indicates the difficulty of securing reenlistments.56 Officers were apparently more willing to serve multiple terms; but here, too, discontinuity posed a severe problem. Captains, for example, usually served more than one term. Among the forty-five captains who commanded companies on the Crown Point expedition in 1756 and whose careers can be traced from 1754 through 1763, thirty-seven (82.2 percent) were members of the army for more than a single campaign.57 Almost half (twenty-two, or 48.9 percent) participated in three or more campaigns, and one—Captain Abel Keen of Pembroke—actually served in every year from 1755 through 1763. Yet of the thirty-seven officers who served several terms, only fourteen served their terms successively. Among the twenty-two who served in three or more years, only five served without interruption. Furthermore, only two managed to serve repeatedly under the same commander; the twenty-five captains whose successive regimental commanders can be ascertained served under from two to four different colonels.58 Among field officers, the same patterns held. They too tended to repeat service, but usually only for two or three campaigns. Moreover, the higher their initial rank, the less likely they were to repeat their service.59 The tendency for men whose initial appointment was as lieutenant 54. Copy of commission, in A. W. Lauber and A. C. Flick, eds., The Papers of Sir William Johnson, I3vols. (Albany, N.Y., 1921-1962), IX, 484. 55. See below, chap. 6. 56. See Table I. 57. Voye, ed., Officers, provides an alphabetical listing of all commissioned officers reflected in the Massachusetts Archives, Vols. XCI-XCIX, with separate entries for each officer's name, his dates and length of service, his residence (when known), and his unit commander's name. These were analyzed for service records of all captains who served in 1756 and all field officers who served during the war as a whole. For summaries see Tables 4-7. 58. See Table 4. 59. See Tables 5-7.

52 Contexts of War colonel or colonel to serve for only a single year would have exacerbated the problem of provincial continuity even if these officers had had experienced troops to lead every year. The military problems engendered by lack of continuity and by shortterm service reflected one of the provincial army's core characteristics, its exceptional voluntariness. This was an aspect of provincial military organization that puzzled and frustrated British officers, who were accustomed to an army that (although technically voluntary itself) relied upon longterm enlistments and freely applied physical coercion. One of the few coercive tools that the province could bring to bear was impressment, but even that, as we have seen, was managed in such a way as to minimize actual compulsion. The practice of hiring substitutes astounded and outraged British officers, who believed that it was more widespread—and more demoralizing—than in fact it was. The earl of Loudoun, for example, added it to his litany of complaint against New Englanders. "Affairs here," he reported from New York late in the summer of 1756, "are in a very bad situation; . . . the New England men, by all accounts, [are] frightened out of their senses at the name of a Frenchman; for those are not the men they use[d] to send out, but fellows hired by other men who should have gone themselves."60 As usual, Loudoun overstated the case. In 1756 fewer than ten men in a hundred among the Massachusetts forces were hired. By far the largest number of provincials were volunteers: nearly nine-tenths of all the Bay Colony's troops had enlisted of their own free will. Only 2.2 percent had been drafted out of their home militia units.61 The 247 hired men did generally differ from the rest of the army. They tended to be older, to rank lower, to be more often born outside the Bay Colony, and to be more frequently unskilled in their civilian occupations. They were also likelier to die, fall ill, or desert by the end of the campaign than their volunteer counterparts. In short, hired men, at least in 1756, had more the look of a permanently marginal group than did the volunteers.62 But the single most important characteristic of such men was surely their rarity. Voluntary recruits chiefly accounted for the army's social complexion. The provincials' manifest shortcomings as soldiers cannot be blamed on a prevalence of hireling, second-class manpower in the ranks.63 60. Loudoun to Cumberland, 29 Aug. 1756, in Pargellis, ed., Military Affairs, 232. Cf. Abercromby to Loudoun, 25 Feb. 1758, LO 5668, cited in Shy, People Armed, 265, n. 22. 61. Conditions of enlistment are summarized in Table 8. 62. Comparisons of the men in the three enlistment categories by various characteristics are summarized in Table 9. 63. Cf. Shy, "A New Look," in People Armed, 23-33, esp. 30-32.

Army and Society 53 The soldiers of Massachusetts Bay were generally young men, younger than the age at which men in their province usually married. The median age was 23 and the modal age 18, but the presence of a small group of older men raised the mean age to 26.3 years. Nearly three-quarters of all soldiers were under 30 years old.64 The overwhelming majority of them had been following a manual occupation of some sort before joining the army, typically a job related to agriculture. These men either worked for themselves and were called "farmers," "yeomen," and "husbandmen," or they worked for someone else as "laborers." The last formed the largest single occupational group in the army, over a third of the men whose occupations are known. Farmers, yeomen, and husbandmen formed a smaller but still substantial group, just over one-fifth of the soldiers. "Husbandmen"—an appellation that implied the ownership of at least some part of one's farm— predominated among them. With the exception of eighty-one sailors and mariners, the rest of the soldiers with manual occupations—two out of five men—were artisans of some sort. Soldiers had been following fifty-seven different trades before enlistment, among which woodworking was the most common, followed by leather-, metal-, and cloth-based crafts. Fewer than two in every hundred soldiers—just 42 of the 2,175 with known occupations—had nonmanual occupations. Seven of them, all officers, called themselves "gentlemen"; most of the rest had been pursuing such modest commercial callings as victualler, tobacconist, and trader.65 Soldiers had been living in every part of the province at the time they enlisted and, essentially, mirrored its distribution of population. Over 90 percent of the provincials were residents of Massachusetts; the rest included residents of New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Five out of every eight Massachusetts residents had been living within thirty miles of Boston when they enlisted. Just over half had been living in the three counties (Essex, Middlesex, and Suffolk) that the central area of the seventeenth-century Bay Colony comprised; about one-fifth were living in the Old Colony region of Bristol, Plymouth, and Barnstable counties, and another fifth were residents of the undersettled western counties of Hampshire and Worcester. The remaining 5 percent had made their homes in the handful of maritime towns that constituted York County (Maine). More men were residents of Boston at enlistment than of any other single town—229 in all.66 The great majority of the army's Massachusetts residents—more than 64. Age distribution of provincials by five-year cohort is summarized in Table 10. 65. Occupational structure of provincials in 1756 is discussed in Anderson, "A People's Army," WMQ, 3d Sen, XL (1983), 506-512; see also "War and the Bay Colony," I, 92; II, 449-451. 66. Residences at enlistment of provincials of 1756 are summarized in Tables II, 12.

54 Contexts of War eight out of every ten—had been born in the province. Of the 429 soldiers who were not natives, roughly half came from each side of the Atlantic: 212 from Great Britain and the European continent, 217 from various colonies in the Western Hemisphere (mostly New England). Unlike these long-distance migrants, the Massachusetts natives were a home-prone lot. Nearly three-fifths of them were still living in their town of birth when they enlisted, and more than three-fourths of them still lived in their native county. Of the one-fifth who had moved beyond the borders of their native county, most were originally from Suffolk, Middlesex, arid Essex; and the majority of these had settled in the western counties of Worcester and Hampshire.67 How far a man tended to move from his hometown, once he left, depended on how densely his native region was populated and how close to Boston it lay. Migrants born closest to the capital, in the most heavily peopled part of the colony, usually moved the furthest; those born in the more lightly settled regions of the province, less far.68 Among the various occupational groups represented in the army, no single one had been especially footloose or especially persistent in its prewar experience. It is clear, however, that soldiers from areas in which one variety of occupation predominated among young men tended to remain close to home if they shared the dominant vocation, and mobile if they did not. Among soldiers from the area of the original Bay Colony, where most young men claimed an affiliation with a trade, artisans were the group most likely to persist in their birthplace until enlistment. Among men from the Old Colony region, where laboring was the principal occupation of young men, laborers tended to be the most persistent; and among men born in the west, where farming was the young man's most frequent vocation, farmers were likeliest to remain in their hometown until they joined the army.69 This pattern reflected men's efforts to match their ambitions to opportunities. In an area as heavily populated as Essex County, for example, a young man who wanted to become a farmer would have found it difficult to acquire the necessary land locally, except by inheritance. Farming was thus an ambition facilitated by movement, most likely to the west or (for men born in Essex) to New Hampshire. Following a trade, on the other hand, represented an ambition more easily fulfilled at home, or nearby. 67. Birthplaces of provincials: see Tables 13-15. 68. Levels of movement for men born in Suffolk, Middlesex, Essex, Plymouth, and Bristol counties were calculated for their various hometowns as a function of distance from Boston. For a complete discussion, see Anderson, "War and the Bay Colony," I, 94; II, 453-456. 69. Levels of persistence by region of birth, for men in various occupational categories in the provincial troops of 1756, are summarized in Table 16.

Army and Society 55 The soldier's age was the single factor most strongly related to his movement or persistence before enlistment. In general, the youngest men in the army (who were also the most numerous) were the ones most often living in or near their birthplace when they enlisted. Immigrants into the province were uniformly the oldest, and transatlantic immigrants the oldest of all. On average, they were more than four years older than soldiers who still lived in their hometown at enlistment—28.9 as compared to 24.3 years of age.70 Among all the age- and nativity-groups the British were on the whole both the oldest and the farthest from home; they also followed different occupations than native recruits, trades that reflected their origins in Great Britain rather than conditions in the Bay Colony." Because of its temporary, voluntary nature, the provincial army broadly corresponded in composition with the makeup of its parent society. The army was not heavily weighted with vagrant or marginal elements; while such men clearly made up a segment of the organization, they composed only a small minority of its membership, probably not much greater than their share of the population at large. The rank structure of the provincials further reinforces the impression of representativeness, since the army's impermanence precluded the development of a systematic promotion system. Officers who served several terms could in no way expect advancement. Among the thirty-seven captains from 1756 who served in more than one campaign, twenty-one retained their original rank. Nine captains had been or would be promoted; seven either were demoted or fluctuated in rank during later service.72 Thus while previous experience could lead to higher rank, it offered no guarantee; civilian social standing was a more powerful determinant of military rank. The most notable characteristic of rank in the provincial regiments was the lack of any clear-cut division between the occupations of officers and enlisted men. Among the regulars, the line between enlisted and commissioned personnel was sharp, if not impassable; the purchase system ensured that most men who entered the officer corps would at least be men of means, and probably gentlemen.73 In the Massachusetts forces, by contrast, over half of the company officers identified themselves with manual occupations, and in fact followed the same livelihoods as private soldiers, although in different proportions. All that can be said about differences between ranks on the basis of occupation is that some ranks drew more of 70. Levels of movement, by average age and cohort, for soliders of 1756: see Tables 17,18. 71. Occupational patterns of British-born versus Massachusetts-born provincials of 1756: see Tables 19,20. 72. See Table 4. 73. The cost of an ensign's billet in the regular army in 1759 was between £200 and £400 sterling, according to Pargellis, Loudoun, 308, n. 36.

56 Contexts of War

Figure I. Occupational Distribution, by Rank, of Provincial Forces, 1756. N = 2,309. See also Table 21. Drawn by Richard Stinely

their members from certain occupations than other ranks did. For example, centinels were most closely associated with the civilian occupation of laborer: centinels made up 75.1 percent of the army, but comprised 87.5 percent of the laborers. By comparison, only 51.2 percent of men with nonmanual occupations were centinels. Officers, on the other hand, were most strongly allied with husbandry and nonmanual pursuits. Company officers made up 5.9 percent of the whole army, yet 7.2 percent of the husbandmen and 21.9 percent of the nonmanual workers in the army held commissions. Overall, the picture is of rather gradual occupational shadings from rank to rank, from private to captain.74 The ages of the soldiers were also continuously graded: seniority in the provincial army was often literally that. Private soldiers averaged 25.8 years of age; noncommissioned officers, 27.8; and officers, 32.8." When broken down into individual ranks and ages and compared with occupations, it appears that the relationship of rank to age was a highly consistent one. Among farmers in the army, those who served as privates had a mean age of 26.5, while those who became captains averaged 37.1 years of age; among laborers, privates had a mean age of 25.8 and the two officers 38.5; among seafarers, privates averaged 27 and sergeants 28.4; among artisans, the privates' mean age was 24.9, and that of captains was 33.4 years.76 The 74. Occupational distribution of provincials by rank is summarized in Table 21. 75. Age averages of provincials by rank: see Table 22. 76. Mean ages of provincials by rank and occupation: see Table23.

Army and Society 57 army was not, of course, exclusively graded by age, any more than Massachusetts society was: a few centinels were in their fifties and sixties. The most telling exception to strict age gradation was the average age of the highest enlisted rank, sergeant (29.8 years), as compared to that of the lowest commissioned rank, ensign (28.1 years). Sergeants were generally older than ensigns in every occupational division as well, except in the case of laborers. A number of factors affected the assignment of rank, particularly family connections, previous military experience, and political finagling. The strength of age gradation and the lack of occupational discontinuities between ranks, however, demonstrate that the army's strongest correspondence was not to any military ideal, but to the society from which, each year, it was drawn. The correspondence between army and society, finally, is evident in the patterns of nativity and migration among officers and enlisted men. Men native to the Bay Colony were almost twice as likely to become noncommissioned officers and three times as likely to become officers as men born in Great Britain—a tendency equally pronounced with respect to other immigrant groups.77 Among natives of the province, however, there was little difference in general level of mobility between men of various ranks. Officers were only slightly more likely than privates to have remained in their birthplace until entering military service.78 Such similarities point once again to broad continuities in social standing, from rank to rank. The break was not obvious or abrupt between men who became soldiers because they were young and not yet settled, and men who became soldiers because they were permanently impoverished and lacked any better prospect in life. For older men in the provincial forces, it was generally true that the higher their rank above centinel, the more successful they were 77. If the provincial army had perfectly reflected the intended establishment as stipulated in the legislation that authorized its organization, its six regiments would have consisted in all of 3,072 men. Of these, 74.2% would have been centinels, 13.7% would have been noncommissioned officers, 5.9% would have been company-grade officers, and 6.2% would have held other ranks (3.9% drummers and clerks, 2.3% staff and other officers). If this is taken as the norm and compared to the men who actually held the ranks by their nativity, considerable divergence is evident, suggesting that men from outside Massachusetts on the whole held lower ranks than natives of the province: Place of Birth Norm Massachusetts Other New England cols. Great Britain Other cols. Europe

N

Centinels

3,072 2,013

74.2% 70.9

183 192 34 20

79.8 77-1 88.2 90.0

NCOs 13.7% 16.1

13.1

8.8 5-9

0.0

Officer.

5-9%

Others 6.2%

5-9

7-0

1.6

5-4 11.9 5-9 5.0

2.1

o.o 5-°

78. Levels of movement, by rank, of Massachusetts provincials: see Table 24.

58 Contexts of War likely to have been in civilian life. Men past their middle thirties—about a decade beyond the average marriage age—who were still serving as private soldiers were more likely to represent permanently marginal or unsuccessful members of New England society. Massachusetts soldiers of 1756 reflected both the geographical distribution and the social structure of the province's population. One consequence of this was that the war touched every town directly—not just through the taxes it paid, but through the experiences and sufferings of its sons. The year 1756 was not marked by severe casualties—only six battle deaths occurred—but at least 71 towns in Massachusetts lost men. In 138 out of the 176 towns that sent soldiers, some milder form of injury occurred among the residents, such as wounds, disease, or lameness.79 Given the low recovery rate from serious illness in the eighteenth century, it is quite probable that many of the sick and wounded, when discharged, went home to die. Indeed, the growing number of petitions answered each year of the war by the General Court, from relatives and others asking compensation for the maintenance of sick soldiers who had died under their care following campaigns, testifies to the commonness of such service-related deaths. At the very least, in 1756 alone 2 out of every 5 towns in Massachusetts suffered a death among their residents in the army, and 4 towns out of every 5 sustained some casualty. Even in its least active year, the war was felt everywhere in the Bay Colony. The impact of military service can also be estimated in terms of Massachusetts' population. In 1756 approximately 2,080 provincials were Bay Colony residents born betwen 1727 and 1740. This amounts to about 9 percent of all Massachusetts males in their age cohort—about one man in twelve.80 As a proportion of the whole, this vastly exceeds the mid79. No town suffered more than six deaths. In the case of Stoughton, a town that six deaths did befall, the dead constituted 13.3% of all the soldiers resident in the town at the time of enlistment.

80. Robert V. Wells, The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776: A Survey of Census Data (Princeton, N.J., 1975), holds that the total reported in the census of 1764, 245,698 inhabitants, represents an undercount. J. Potter, in "The Growth of Population in America, 1700-1860," in D. V. Glass and D.E.C. Eversley, eds., Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography (London, 1965), 638-639, provides a higher estimate; working from his charts (a) and (d), one can interpolate a 1764 population of 259,000. (I.e., his estimates for 1760 and 1770 are 235,000 and 299,000, respectively, and his decadal growth for 1760-1770 is consequently 27%, or 2.43% annually.) Regarding 245,698 as the lowest possible population for 1764 and Potter's 259,000 as an upper limit, and taking an annual growth rate for the period 1750-1760 of 2.7% (from Potter's decadal increase for the period of 31%), the total population in 1756 would have been between 198,000 and 210,000 people. Applying West model life tables for mortality levels between 6 and 15 and an annual growth rate of 25/1000, between 24.7% and 25.5% of the male population would range from 16 through 29 years of age at any given time. (See Ansley J. Coale and Paul Demeny, Regional Model Life

Army and Society 59 eighteenth-century ratio of redcoats to the British population.81 Yet 1756 was a year of light military engagement for Massachusetts; two years later more than twice as many men would serve in its army, a number nearly matched in the following year as well. All in all, Massachusetts counted 30,000 enlistments in its provincial forces during the war, a number that does not include terms served by artificers, batteauxmen, and rangers; nor does it include terms served aboard the province frigate or privateers, or enlistments in the regular army.82 Even if we assume that every man who enlisted in the provincial army served an average of two terms, so that all 30,000 enlistments involved only 15,000 men, and if we apply the same proportions of residence and age observed in the 1756 army to the whole, Tables and Stable Populations [Princeton, N.J., 1966], 132-150, 180-198.) Taking into account the sex-ratio imbalance reported in the 1764 census, the male segment of the estimated 1756 population would number between 96,030 and 101,850; applying the Coale-Demeny percentages yields a population in the 16-29 range of from 23,719 to 25,972. Now, the army in 1756 had 2,391 men of known ages, 1,741 of whom (72.8%) were from 16 through 29 years old; if the same percentage is applied to all 3,047 men in the army, the total in the range is 2,220. Of all men with known residences, 93.8% lived in Massachusetts at enlistment; thus the total number of residents from 16 through 29 would have been on the order of 2,080. This is from 8.0% to 8.8% of the total number of men estimated to be in the range 16-29. The order of magnitude, at least, of this estimate can be confirmed from an independent source. In 1763, Gov. Francis Bernard reported to the Board of Trade that Massachusetts, in 1759, had had approximately 35,000 "fencible men" (i.e., service-eligible militiamen)—a category including men in the ages 16-50. (Bernard to the Lords Commissioners for Trade and Plantations, 5 Sept. 1763, quoted in Joseph Henry Benton, Jr., Early Census-Making in Massachusetts, 1643-1765 [Boston, 1905], 502.) Within the army of 1756, approximately 2,790 men were Massachusetts residents aged 16 through 50; this amounts to 8.0% of Bernard's "fencibles"—or, if one reduces the number to compensate for population growth, to approximately 32,500 in 1756, this amounts to 8.6%. 81. This comparison is decidedly on the conservative side. At its loo-regiment peak, the regular army would have numbered 70,000 men. This number represents something like 1.1% of the total population of England and Wales in the period. (See population estimates in D.V. Glass, "Population Movements in England and Wales, 1700 to 1850," in Glass and Eversley, Population in History, 240; these approximate 6.5 million. These estimates omit Ireland and Scotland, the source of many redcoats, so the proportion for the British Isles as a whole would be even lower.) The total of all Massachusetts residents in the army of the province, about 2,860 men, amounted to about 1.4% of the highest estimated population of the colony. 82. Enlistments in each year of the war for Massachusetts provincials were as follows: 1755 l,2Oomen 1756 3,000 men 1757 1, 800 men 1758 7,000 men

1759 1760 1761 1762

6,800 4,000 3,000 3,200

men men men men

Thus a total of 30,000 enlistments (Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay, ed. Lawrence Shaw Mayo [Cambridge, Mass., 1936 (orig. publ.

60 Contexts of War then at least 30 percent of all Massachusetts men who were between sixteen and twenty-nine years of age during the war would have served in the provincial army.83 Such a figure would scarcely have surprised the Bay colonists themselves. One contemporary noted that "one-third part" of Massachusetts' eligible males had served during the war.84 The significance of such a proportion for a province populated by large families was immense. If one-third of the men born between 1725 and 1745 became provincial soldiers, it would have been possible for every family in the province to be represented in the army. Large families, moreover, mean extensive kinship networks, so that even families not directly touched by military service certainly had relatives who became soldiers. London, 1828)], III, 30, 34, 45, 59-60, 69, 76, 78, 80, 95, 99). The number of Massachusetts men with the "general service" was as high as 3,000 in a given year. According to Thomas Pownall, in 1758 Massachusetts supplied, along with its provincials "in the king's service and the king's ships, transports, hatteaumen, carpenters, and rangers under the general service in all above 2,500 men," so that for the year the provincial levy of 7,000 "together with those employed in other parts of his Majesty's service is a draught of near 10,000 men out of the effective fighting men in this province." (Pownall to William Pitt, 30 September 1758, in Parkman Papers, XLII, 285, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; a copy made from State Papers, America and West Indies, LXXI, Public Record Office, London.) 83. This is as low an estimate as can reasonably be made. During the years 1755-1763 the Massachusetts population grew from approximately 205,650 to 254,500, extrapolating from Potter's estimates ("Growth of Population," in Glass and Eversley, eds. Population inHistory, 638—639). Applying the Coale-Demeny life tables, the number of men in the 16-29 age group would have grown from 25,434 to 30,648 during the same period, which is to say that approximately 34,000 men all told were included in this age-range at some point during the war years. Reducing the 15,000 hypothetical enlistees first by 6.2% to dismiss nonresidents of Massachusetts, then by 27.2% to eliminate men outside the 16-29 age group, the total of Massachusetts residents 16—29 years old from this group would amount to 10,243 men. This number is 30.1% of all 34,000 Massachusetts males that fell within the age bracket 16-29 at some point during the war. The figure of 15,000, furthermore, must be taken as a minimal estimate. There was, of course, a good deal of reenlistment among provincials from year to year (although we do not yet know how much); but each campaign reduced the number of troops capable of reenlisting considerably. In the 1756 campaign, as we shall see, at least 5.7% of the original recruits were dead by the end of the year, and 22.6% were either sick or wounded; just over half of the original enlistees were still present and fit for duty. If we assume that 1756 was a bad year— which it seems not to have been—and estimate that only 15% of each year's soldiers were incapable of reenlistment, even this removes some 4,500 men from the pool of potential reenlistees over the course of the war. This in turn suggests that a number larger than 15,000 probably served with the provincials; indeed, if the enlisted men conformed to the pattern of the captains of 1756 in repeating service, approximately 16,000 would have served during the war. If as many as 20,000 men served the 30,000 enlistments, the percentage of men aged 16—29 from the province who served would probably have approximated 40%. 84. William Bollan's memorial to the king, n Apr. 1764, claimed that "one-third part" of the eligible men in Massachusetts had "become your Majesty's soldiers" in the course of the war (quoted in Nash, Urban Crucible, 243).

Army and Society 61 Even a long lifetime after the Peace of Paris, the war's pervasiveness was well known in Massachusetts. In 1835 Nathaniel Hawthorne reminded his readers in the second of a series of sketches called "Old News" for the New-England Magazine how fully, "in the heat of the Old French War," New Englanders could "be termed a martial people. Every man was a soldier, or the father or brother of a soldier; and the whole land literally echoed with the roll of the drum either beating up for recruits among the towns and villages, or striking the march towards the frontiers. . . . The country has never known a period of such excitement and warlike life, except during the Revolution—perhaps scarcely then; for that was a lingering war, and this a stirring and eventful one."85 Regular officers in America, who were personally unfamiliar with American social conditions, misunderstood the nature of the provincial soldiery. Applying regular army notions of efficiency, organization, and discipline, redcoat officers saw the provincials as hopelessly disorganized, badly disciplined, and prone to desertion or mutiny. The reason for this, they concluded, was that the provincial soldier himself was a poor specimen. Major General James Abercromby believed that the provincial army of 1756— the one we have been examining—was made up of "riff-raff," the "lowest dregs of the people, both officers and men."86 Judging from the information now at hand, Abercromby's estimate was far from accurate, but it aptly expressed the prevailing British opinion. Not surprisingly, New Englanders saw their soldiery in a much more favorable light. In 1755, an imperious British commander tried to recruit men from among two battalions of New Englanders in Nova Scotia. The ranking provincial officer, Lieutenant Colonel John Winslow, was outraged at the attempt to entice men who had not been informed that they were being enlisted for life in the king's troops. "Sure I am," Winslow protested to the governor of the colony, if such enlistments were to be countenanced, that it will be a most impolitical step, as these men are sons of some of the best yeomen in New England, who encouraged them to undertake this expedition, . . . and on like occasions the men have been returned at the end of the time limited, and [it] was expected by governor and people [that this] would have now been the case. And if [they are] disappointed and their children [are] kept, there will be an end put to any future assistance, let the extremity be what it will.87 85. 86. 87. Scotia

Roy Harvey Pearce, ed., Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York, 1982), 261. Quoted in Pargellis, Loudoun, 99. John Winslow to Charles Lawrence, 27Oct. 1755, in "Journal of Winslow," Nova Hist. Soc., Colls., IV (1884), 180.

62 Contexts of War In a similar tone of warning the governor of Massachusetts wrote to William Pitt three years later. Thomas Pownall, who had governed the Bay Colony since mid-1757, was trying to explain the immense pressure the war had put on the province's financial and human resources and was pleading for relief in the form of a subsidy. In passing, Pownall also characterized the provincial army: I beg leave, sir, to inform you that most of these soldiers in the ranks are freeholders, who pay taxes; that these are the sons of some of our representatives, the sons of some of our militia colonels, and the sons of many of our field officers and other officers [who are] now doing duty as privates in the number I have this year raised. And that the sons of some of our principal merchants, one who pays £500 sterling per annum [in] taxes, were impressed for the same.88 When Massachusetts fielded a provincial force during the Seven Years' War, as Winslow and Pownall were trying to make clear, it was sending forth its sons in more than a metaphorical sense. The provincials represented a kind of image of the colony's society at large; they were Everyman's sons and were expected to return to normal civilian livelihoods after their military interlude had ended. To a degree that may be unique in American history, social and economic conditions had made the Seven Years' War for the Bay Colony into a people's war and virtually guaranteed that it would be fought—voluntarily—by armies of the people. 88. Pownall to Pitt, loSept. 1758, Parkman Papers, XLII, 285.

Chapter 3

Covenant: God's wrath against unfaithful Israel

Metcalf

11 Sept. 1757

*8.

Exod. 17:8-16

Forbes 2 July 1758

God fights for Israel

J. Cleaveland

*9.

Exod. 23:20-21

Shute 2 July 1758

God fights for Israel

Shute

Provincial Sermons 255 No.

Text

Preacher, Date

Theme

Source

Deut. 23:9

]. Cleaveland 18 June 1758

Soldierly conduct: importance of good behavior on expedition

J. Cleaveland

11.

Deut. 32:29

Pomeroy 25 June 1758

Covenant, judgment: Israel must remember God's dealings

Shute

12.

Deut. 29:4

E. Cleaveland 3 Sept. 1758

Covenant: God's actions remind Israel of relationship

Rea

*13.

Josh. 24:15

Graham 8 Aug. 1756

Covenant: Israel must choose whether to serve or forsake the Lord

Graham

*14.

Josh. 7:1-13

J. Cleaveland 20 Aug. 1758

Covenant: God causes Joshua to seek out the accursed thing in Israel's midst

J. Cleaveland

15.

Judg. 5:9

J. Cleaveland 11 June 1758

God blesses the willing warriors of Israel (Deborah)

J. Cleaveland

16.

Judg. 5:2

Pomeroy 21 Oct. 1759

God blesses the willing warriors of Israel (Deborah)

Morris (1758)

17.

Judg. 20:25-28

Morrell 2 July 1758

Covenant: God fights for Israel

Richardson

*18.

1 Sam. 14:6

Crawford 15 July 1759

God fights for Israel (Jonathan vs. Philistines)

Knowlton

*19.

1 Sam. 17:45

Forbes 8 July 1759

God fights for Israel (David and Goliath)

Hardy

*20.

2 Sam. 10:12

? 8 July 1759

Courage in the Lord

Webster

21.

2 Kings 4: 26

Forbes 17 Sept. 1758

Faith in affliction

Harris

22.

1 Chron. 1 : 1

Paine 26 Oct. 1755

Mortality (all men must die)

Chandler

*23.

IChron. 16:31

Shute 27 Aug. 1758

Covenant: God is faithful, therefore greatly to be praised

Shute

*24.

2 Chron. 5:20

p 29 July 1759

God fights for Israel when Israel trusts in God

Wood, Hoiman, Knowlton

*10.

256 Provincial Sermons •J.o.

Text

Preacher, Date

Theme

Source

2Chron. 14:11

Norton 2 Nov. 1755

Covenant: God delivers his people in danger and war

Dwight

26.

Job

Dunbar 2 Nov. 1755

Mortality

Chandler

27.

Job 36: 5

Chandler 9 Nov. 1755

God's power

Chandler

28.

Ps. 103:19

Chandler 19 Oct. 1755

God's sovereignty

Chandler

29.

Ps. 103 : 19

? 19 Nov. 1758

God's sovereignty

Knap

30.

Ps. 145:3

Chandler 16 Nov. 1755

God's greatness

Chandler, Dwight

Pss. 66: 8; 77: 16-18; 99: 1,5

Chandler 18 Nov. 1755

Earthquake reflects God's power, sovereignty

Chandler

32.

Ps. 84:12

Graham 27 June 1756

God strengthens and preserves the faithful

Graham

*33.

Ps. 78:37

Graham 7 June 1756

Wickedness violates the covenant

Graham

34.

Ps. 119:43

Jones 28 Apr. 1757

Covenant: the necessity of respecting God's laws

Metcalf

35.

Ps. 16:2

5

God's mercy in the preservation of his people

Metcalf

God's mercy in the preservation of his people

Metcalf

God's mercy in the preservation of his people

Metcalf

God fights for Israel

Richardson

*25.

*31.

11 Sept. 1757

36.

Ps. 16:2

37.

Ps. 16:2

38.

Ps. 68:30

5

11 Sept. 1757 ? 9 Oct. 1757 •) 11 June 1758

*39.

Ps. 112:7-8

E. Cleaveland 18 June 1758

God fights for his people

Morris

*40.

Ps. 37 : 7

Morrell 16 July 1758

Trust in the Lord; God will avenge evil

Richardson

*41.

Ps. 107

E. Cleaveland 25 July 1758

God's mercy, deliverance

Morris

Ps. 23

J. Cleaveland 30 July 1758

God's preserving love

Rea, J. Cleaveland

42.

Provincial Sermons 257 No.

Text

Preacher, Date

Theme

Source

43.

Ps. 83:14-15

Ingersoll 30 July 1758

A cursing psalm: God's wrath called down on his enemies

L. Lyon

44.

Ps. 113:5

Ogilvie 8 Aug. 1758

God's greatness

Morris

45.

Ps. 84:11

J. Cleaveland 13 Aug. 1758

God strengthens and shields his faithful people

J. Cleaveland

46.

Ps. 11:6

J. Cleaveland 17 Sept. 1758

God's justice: a trial for the righteous, punishment for the wicked

J. Cleaveland

47.

Ps. 76:7

Hitchcock 17 Sept. 1758

God's wrath against the wicked

Shute

48.

Ps. 139:23-24

Hitchcock 17 Sept. 1758

God's omniscience

Shute

Ps. 91:2

>

God's protection and strength

Morris (1758)

15 July 1759

*49.

50.

Ps. 144:1

Crawford 5 Aug. 1759

God's strength; divine approval of war

Wood, Knowlton

51.

Ps. 39:1

Leavenworth 5 Aug. 1759

Beware of profanity and all sins of speech

Wood, Knowlton

52.

Ps. 119:15

Pomeroy 16 Sept. 1759

Blessedness of God's law

Morris (1758)

53.

Ps. 63:3

p

God's lovingkindness

Jenks(1760)

5 Oct. 1759

54.

Prov. 3:16-18

Morrell 17 Sept. 1758

Excellence of knowing God's will

Richardson

*55.

Isa. 8:19

Graham 15 Aug. 1756

Israel's wickedness, need of reformation

Graham

*56.

Isa. 16:9

Pomeroy 16 July 1758

God promises vengeance against Israel's enemies

L. Lyon

Isa. 66:1,2

Beckett 6 Aug. 1758

God's mercy and sovereignty

Morris

Isa. 1:5

Forbes 10 Sept. 1758

Suffering comes of revolt against God; repent and be comforted

Harris

Isa. 55:6

J. Cleaveland 1 Oct. 1758

The search for faith must not be delayed

J. Cleaveland

Jer. 23:10

Shute 16 July 1758

The evils of profanity

Shute

57. *58.

59. *60.

258 Provincial Sermons No.

Text

Preacher, Date

Theme

Source

*61.

Jer. 48:10

Forbes 15 July 1759

God curses Israel's enemy, sanctions shedding blood

Hardy, M.erriman

62.

Jer. 6:16

True 22 Aug. 1762

God will punish transgressors of his way

True (1759)

63.

Ezek. 33 : 5

Chandler 9 Nov. 1755

Deliverance from judgment, battle

Chandler

64.

Ezek. 25:12-17

Woodbridge 18 June 1758

God fights for Israel

Richardson

*65.

Ezek. 33:11

J. Cleaveland 16 July 1758

Judgment and the necessity of repentance

J. Cleaveland

66.

Ezek. 37:26

Pomeroy 24 Sept. 1758

Covenant: God promises peace and blessing

L. Lyon

67.

Ezek. 36:37

Pomeroy 8 Oct. 1758

Covenant: God promises peace and blessing

L. Lyon

*68.

Amos 4: 12

Eals 16 July 1758

God's judgment and the necessity of repentance

L. Lyon

69.

Amos 4 : 12

J. Cleaveland 15 Oct. 1758

God's judgment and the necessity of repentance

Sweat, Morris

Micah6:6, 7

? 23 July 1758

God-pleasing conduct: how one ought to approach God

L. Lyon

71.

Nah. 1:7

Little 25 June 1758

God is faithful to his people in the day of judgment

Shute

72.

Mai. 1:6

J. Cleaveland 23 July 1758

Covenant: God's paternal relation to his adopted people

Rea, J. Cleaveland

73.

Matt. 24:30-31

Chandler 26 Oct. 1755

The last times

Chandler

Matt. 3:8

J. Cleaveland 18 July 1758

Soldierly conduct: repentance is necessary in wartime

Rea, J. Cleaveland

75.

Matt. 17:13-14

Shute 23 July 1758

Necessity of righteousness (the strait gate)

Shute

76.

Matt. 19:28

Emerson 6 Aug. 1758

Jesus promises glory to his followers

Morris

77.

Matt. 7:12

Shute 8 Oct. 1758

God's goodness and love

Nichols

*70.

*74.

Provincial Sermons 259 No.

Text

Preacher, Date

Theme

Source

78.

Matt. 5:44

Forbes 24 June 1759

Love your enemies

Hardy

79.

Matt. 5:2, 3

Crawford 8 July 1759

Humility

Wood, Hoiman

80.

Matt. 5:8

Forbes 23 Sept. 1759

Purity and the pursuit of holiness

Hardy

81.

Mark 16:16

Graham 11 July 1756

Belief leads to eternal life; unbelief, to damnation

Graham

82.

Mark 10:21

J. Cleaveland 27 Aug. 1758

Discipleship: the necessity of total commitment to Christ

J. Cleaveland

83.

Mark 2: 26-27

Forbes 30 Sept. 1759

The Sabbath; Jesus' dominion

Morris (1758)

84.

Luke 19:41-42

> 25 Sept. 1757

The coming judgment

Metcalf

85.

Luke 3 : 14

J. Cleaveland 11 June 1758

Soldierly obedience

J. Cleaveland

*86.

Luke 16:19-22

Morrell 16 July 1758

God raises up the afflicted

Richardson

*87.

Luke 13:2-3

J. Cleaveland 16 July 1758

The nature of God's judgment and the necessity of repentance

J. Cleaveland

Luke 21:36

•> 13 Aug. 1758

Preparedness for the judgment day

Richardson

Luke 7:41-43

J. Cleaveland 27 Aug. 1758

God's great forgiveness demands great thanksgiving

J. Cleaveland

90.

John 5:39

Eals 16 July 1758

Search the Scriptures

Morris

91.

John 3:16

? 23 July 1758

God's surpassing love

L. Lyon

92.

Acts 24:25

•> 2 Oct. 1757

Immediacy of judgment; belief cannot be put off

Metcalf

93.

Acts 24:25

? 3 Sept. 1758

Immediacy of judgment; belief cannot be put off

L. Lyon

94.

Acts 10:12

Forbes 30 July 1758

Faith transcends outward observance of the law

Harris

95.

Acts 20:27

J. Cleaveland 15 Oct. 1758

The role of the pastor as he who declares the counsel of God to the faithful

J. Cleaveland

88. *89.

260 Provincial Sermons No.

Text

Preacher, Date

Theme

Source

96.

Rom. 11:36

E. Cleaveland 30 Sept. 1759

The all-sufficiency of God

Morris (1758)

97.

Rom. 3:31

E. Cleaveland 6 Aug. 1758

Faith completes the law

Morris

98.

Rom. 9:18

p 17 June 1759

God's sovereignty

Woods

99.

Rom. 2:3, 4

Pomeroy 19 Sept. 1759

God's judgment

Webster, Morris (1758)

100.

2 Cor. 4:18

Morrell 24 Sept. 1758

Regard eternal, not temporal things

Sweat

101.

2 Cor. 5:11

5

Judgment: the terror of God

Knap

3 Dec. 1758

102.

2 Cor. 1 : 12

Forbes 16 Sept. 1759

The joy of Christian living

Webster, Morris (1758)

103.

Eph. 5:2

Chandler 16 Nov. 1755

Salvation as the gift of Christ; love

Chandler, Dwight

*104.

Eph. 6:13

E. Cleaveland 25 June 1758

God preserves the faithful (the whole armor of God)

Morris

*105.

Eph. 6:18

J. Cleaveland 2 July 1758

Prayer and God's preservation (the whole armor)

Rea, J. Cleaveland

106.

Eph. 5:14

J. Cleaveland 3 Sept. 1758

Exhortation to refrain from sin, and escape death

J. Cleaveland

107.

Eph. 2:12

Cleaveland 1 Oct. 1758

Covenant: extended by faith in Christ

J. Cleaveland

108.

Eph. 5:15-16

Crawford 12 Aug. 1759

The necessity of virtuous conduct; the coming judgment

Wood, Hoiman, Knowlton

109.

Phil. 1:6

Cleaveland 4 June 1758

God's faithfulness to his people

Rea, J. Cleaveland

110.

Phil. 1:6

Cleaveland 10 Aug. 1758

God's faithfulness to his people

Rea, J. Cleaveland

111.

Phil. 4:8

Cleaveland 30 July 1758

Virtuous conduct

Rea, J. Cleaveland

112.

Phil. 1 : 10

Cleaveland 6 Aug. 1758

Perseverance in virtue until the end

Rea, J. Cleaveland

113.

Phil. 2:15-16

J. Cleaveland 10 Sept. 1758

Virtuous conduct: the lives of the saints as examples

J. Cleaveland

Provincial Sermons 261 No.

Text

Preacher, Date

Theme

Source

114.

Phil. 1 : 27

J. Cleaveland 15 Oct. 1758

Exhortation to be faithful and confident to the end

J. Cleaveland

115.

Col. 1:23

Shute 16 July 1758

Faith brings eternal life

Shute

116.

Col. 3:3

Emerson 6 Aug. 1758

Judgment will surely come

Morris

117.

Col. 3:11

J. Cleaveland 3 Sept. 1758

Faith in Christ brings renewal of life and unity

J. Cleaveland

118.

1 Thes. 1 : 10

J. Cleaveland 24 Sept. 1758

The last things: watchfulness

J. Cleaveland

119.

2 Tim. 2:8-10

•) 9 Sept. 1759

Endurance in faith

Holman

120.

Heb. 8:10

Eals 25 July 1758

Covenant: the nature of God's relationship with his chosen

Morris

121.

Heb. 8:10

Eals 27 Sept. 1758

Covenant: the nature of God's relationship with his chosen

Morris

122.

Heb. 2:3,4

? 27 Oct. 1759

The duty of obedience, the certainty of judgment

Morris (1758)

123.

James 5 : 16

The efficacy of prayer

L. Lyon

124.

James 5 : 12

Eals 2 July 1758 p 10 Sept. 1758

Swear not

L. Lyon

125.

James 5: 12

Pomeroy 17 Sept. 1758

Swear not

L. Lyon

126.

2 Pet. 3:10-12

5

The last things: the day of judgment

Morris

8 Oct. 1758

127.

1 John 5 : 12

J. Cleaveland 6 Aug. 1758

Salvation by faith (he that hath the Son hath life)

Nichols, J. Cleaveland

128.

1 John 5 : 12

J. Cleaveland 8 Oct. 1758

Salvation by faith (he that hath the Son hath life)

Nichols, J. Cleaveland

129.

Jude6

J. Cleaveland 24 Sept. 1758

The last things: God will punish those who depart from his paths

J. Cleaveland

130.

Rev. 1:7

Crawford 9 Sept. 1759

The last things; Christ is coming in power

Holman

131.

Rev. 12:11

Chandler 2 Nov. 1755

The last things: the battle against Satan

Chandler

262

Provincial Sermons

No.

Text

Preacher, Date

*132 .

Rev. 2:6

>

16 July 1758

Theme

Source

God will favor even the erring believer who opposes the enemies of the Lord

Sweat

133 .

Rev. 3:18

J. Cleaveland 10 Sept. 1758

God is all-sufficient for the needs of sinners

J. Cleaveland

134 .

Rev. 3:20

True 9 Sept. 1759

Christ's invitation to faith

True

135 .

Rev. 20:14

True 22 Aug. 1762

The last things: the day of judgment

True (1759)

Index

Abercromby, James, 16-18, 74, 76, 89, 176, 177, 202, 216; appointed commander in chief, 1 6; recalled and promoted, 1 8; and assault on Ticonderoga (1758), 16-17, 154-155; assumes command, 168-169; and Joint service with provincials, 170; and Winslow, 171 Acadia. See Nova Scotia Acadians: deportation of, 9-10, 219 Adams, John (pseud. Humphrey Ploughjogger): on Seven Years' War, 25 Adams, Nathan, 126-127 Agriculture: subsistence, 28-29 Albany, N.Y., 69, 73, 81, 173, 177, 180, 181, 183; and provincial sightseers, 72 Amesbury, Mass., 44 Amherst, Jeffery, 16-23, 65, 75, 191, 205, 209; sent to America, 16; and Louisbourg, 17; appointed commander in chief, 1 8; and Ticonderoga and Crown Point, 1 8; leads expedition against Montreal, 19; conquers Canada, 21; popularity in America, 23; and pardons, 123 Amherst, William: and Newfoundland expedition, 22 Amherst's expedition (1760), 19, 207 Andover, Mass., 186 Approach march, provincial, 69-74 Arbuthnot, William, 186 Articles of War. See Rules and Articles of War Artisan: as occupation, 36-37 Atkins, Richard, 68 n Bacon, William, 43 Bagley, Jonathan, 43, 190, 191. See also Units, provincial: Bagley, Col. Jonathan: Regiment "Ballad of 1755," 218-223 Barber, John, 135-136

Battalions. See Units, provincial; Units, regular Battle: nature of, 142-143; effects of, on soldiers, 143-155; anticipation of, 143144; depression following, 144-145; soldiers' descriptions of, 145-155; sensory impressions of, 153—154; injuries in, I 53- I 54j impact of, 154-155; provincials' motivations in, 155-161 Battle of Lake George (1755), 10, 142, 144145, 157, 220-221

Battle of Quebec (1759), 18-19, 142 Battle of Saint John's, Newfoundland (1762), 142, 158 Battle of the Monongahela (1755), 1 1, 219 Battle of Ticonderoga (1758), 16-17, I4 2 > 143; provincial unpreparedness for, 7677; soldiers' descriptions of, 147-154; casualties at, I47n; Abercromby's role in, 1 54- 1 555 as providential event, 202 Bay Colony counties (Essex, Middlesex, Suffolk): and Massachusetts, 36-37; and provincial troops, 53, 54; and migration patterns, 54 Beating orders, 41 Beckwith, Mr. (Massachusetts provincial chaplain), 93 Belknap, Jeremiah, Jr., 42 Belknap, Jeremiah, Sr., 42 Bellomont, earl of, 26—27 Bernard, Francis, 21, 99 Biddeford, Mass, (later Maine), 30 Billeting money, 69 Bland, Humphrey: A Treatise of Military Discipline, 77 Blasphemy: among regulars, 117-118 "Bloody Morning Scout," 220 Boake, Daniel, 136 Board of Trade and Plantations, 99 Bony, Henry, 133-134

264 Index Boston, 67, 73 Bounties, 51 Boyden, Ebenezer, 43 Boyden, Elhanan, 43 Boyden, Jonathan, 43 Boyle, John, 22 Braddock, Edward, 168, 219-220; appointed commander in chief, 9; killed, n Bradstreet, John, 81; captures Fort Frontenac, 17, 157-158; and name-calling, 119-120 Brewer, Sergeant (Massachusetts provincial), 126 Brookfield, Mass., 68, 70 Burk, John, 207 Burton, Ralph, 95-96 Campaigning. See Provincial military service Campaign of 1754, 9 Campaign of 1755. See Battle of Lake George; Nova Scotia expedition Campaign of 1756. See Crown Point expedition (1756) Campaign of 1757, 13 Campaign of 1758. See Battle of Ticonderoga; Louisbourg Campaign of 1759. See Crown Point; Saint Lawrence expedition; Siege: of Ticonderoga Campaign of 1760, 19-21, 207-209 Campaign of 1762, 21-22, 45 Camp diseases, 99, 221. See also Disease; Mortality levels "Camp distempers." See Camp diseases; Disease; Mortality levels Camp followers. See Camp women; Sutlers Camp life, provincial, 74-83; routines of, 77-82; conditions, 95-98 "Camp news." See Rumors Camp women, 118-119 Canada, 3; invaded, 18, 19, 21; capitulates, 21; British strategy against, 142 Cape Breton Island, 142. See also Louisbourg; Nova Scotia Carthagena expedition (1740), 169 Casey, James, 133-134 Casualty rate. See Mortality levels Cataraqui. See Fort Frontenac Chandler, Samuel, 71, 210; as sightseer, 73 Chaplains, provincial, 220; exhort troops

before battle, 156-157; compared to regular, 210; preaching of, 211-214. See also Sermons Charlestown, Mass., 73 Chebacco Parish, Ipswich, Mass., 72, 210 Clark, Joseph, Jr., 43 Clark, Joseph, Sr. , 43 Cleaveland, Ebenezer, 93 Cleaveland, John: as diarist, 65; as sightseer, 72-73; on dinner with Abercromby, 89; builds house, 93-94; on mortality in Bagley's regiment, I oo- 104; on hospital conditions, 106; as correspondent, 108; on regular treatment of provincials, 114; on regular profanity, 117; and execution of regular, 139; on provincial battle morale, 143-144; on battle of Ticonderoga, 147-149, 152-154; and sermon before battle of Ticonderoga, 156-157; on plunder from Fort Frontenac, 158; providentialism of, 201-202, 207; as chaplain, 214-216; preaching style of, 215; and conception of chaplaincy, 215-216; and opinion of regulars, 215-216 Clough, Gibson: as diarist, 65, 66; and Election Day, 1 1 5 ; on discipline at Louisbourg, 140-141; and mutiny in Bagley's regiment, 189—191; on mutinous troops, 193 Coffin, Benjamin, 43 Coffin, Joseph, 43 Coffin, Tristram, 43 Cole, Robert, 31-32 Combat. See Battle Commander in chief, British: nature of office, 13, 14. See also Abercromby, James; Amherst, Jeffery; Braddock, Edward; Loudoun, John Campbell, 4th earl of; Shirley, William Commissaries, provincial regimental, 181 Commissioners of supply, provincial, 181 , 182 Committees of War, provincial, 181 "Common providences," 197 Community. See Military community Companies. See Units, provincial Connecticut: and Crown Point expedition (1755), 10

Connecticut River, 18, 73 Conscription. See Enlistment, provincial; Impressment, provincial; Recruiting

Index 265 Contractualism, 167-168, 194-195; of provincial officers, 168—179; of provincial political leaders, 179-185; of provincial troops, 185-194; and New England context, 172, 178-179; and sovereignty, 179; and supply system, 182; and Seven Years' War experience, 223 Corbin, Jonathan, 160 Courts-martial: provincial, 124, 125, 131135; regimental, 132-133; general, 132133; manipulation of, 132—135; punishments handed down by, 137. See also Military justice; Punishments Crawford, William, 157, 211 Criminal law, British, 121-122 Cross, Stephen, 72 Crown Point, 19, 120, 198, 207; Fort Saint Frederic built at, 10; captured by Amherst, 1 8 Crown Point expedition (1755), 10. See also Battle of Lake George Crown Point expedition (1756), 12, 169170, 174-175, 180 Crown Point-Township Number 4 road, 18,83 Cruikshanks, Charles, 112, H2n Cuba, 22 Cumberland, William Augustus, duke of, 177 Currency, Massachusetts, 8,9. See also Economy of Massachusetts Cursing, 117-118 Curtis, John, 70 Dana, Richard, 40 n Davis, John, 32 Death rate. See Mortality levels Debt, 30-32 Deerfield River, 163 Dehortee, Morgan, 136 De Lancey political faction, 11-12 Delarue, William, 133-134 Desertion, provincial, 187; and diet, 86, 182-183; in Doty's regiment (1758), 112, H2n; from Fort Cumberland, 129; of Learned's company, 162-164; from Lyman's command, 183; and contractualism, 188-189; and Ruggles's regiment, 188-189; from Willard's regiment, 191-192 Detroit (French military post), 17

Diaries, provincial, 65-66; routine and reflective, 196-197; list of, 243-249 Dieskau, Baron, 10 Diet, provincial, 83; and ration shortages, 84-90; composition of rations, 84-86; and effect on regular-provincial relations, 86-87; and desertion, 86; and abuse of verse, 86-87; an !O; under Pitt, 14; effects of, 16; politicians' anxiety over, 184-185 Reinforcements, 107, 1 80 Religion as a motivation in combat, 155-157 "Remarkable providences," 197, 199 Rendezvous points, 67 Replacements, provincial, 107, 180 Republicanism, 217-218, 223 Requisition system, 14 Revere, Paul, 50 Revolution, American: and Seven Years' War, 22-23, 223 Rhode Island, 1 19; and Crown Point expedition (1755), 10 Richardson, Amos, 76; on guard duty, 80; on fatigue duty, 82-83; on provision shortages, 83; on provincial morale and battle, 143-144; on Halfway Brook skirmish, 146; on plundering, 159 Richelieu River, 19 Richmond, John, 44-45 "River Gods," 69 Robertson, James, 81 Robinson, Samuel, Jr., 43 Robinson, Samuel, St., 43 Rogers, Nathan, 44-45 Rogers's Rangers. See Units, regular Rollo, Lord Andrew, 215 Ruggles, Timothy, 46-47, 50; and courtmartial system, 133-135; exhorts troops, 157 Rules and Articles of War, 67, 120, 123, 127, 128, 129, 190; and Shirley, 169; and rank of provincial officers, 169; and Loudoun, 170 Rum, 82, 86-87, 127, 128, l83n Rumors: concerning disease, 103; concerning discharge, 107; concerning desertion, 112; concerning punishments, 138 Rutland, Mass., 197 Sabbath-breaking among regulars, 117-118 Saint Andrew's Day, 115 Saint George's Day, 115, 116 Saint Lawrence expedition (1759), 45 Saint Lawrence River, 13, 18, 19, 77, 142, 205 Saint Patrick's Day, 115, 116

272 Index Salem, Mass., 65, 73 Saltonstall, Richard, 133-135 Sanitation, 96-98 Schenectady, N.Y., 73 Sermons, 211-214; before battle, 156-157; themes of, 211-212; "improvement" of events in, 212— 213; on soldierly conduct, 213; on God's attributes, 213; on divine judgment, 213; and millennialism, 213214; list of, 254-262 Seven Years' War: effects of, on Massachusetts, 3, 6, 16, 21; overview and periodization of, 6-7; first phase of, 6, 8-12; second phase of, 7, 12-14; third phase of, 7, 14-21; fourth phase of, 7, 21-22; historiography of, 22-23; and Massachusetts provincial veterans, 23, 58-61; and social groups of Massachusetts, 25; as educational experience, 25, 195, 223; and Massachusetts towns, 58; providential significance of, 222; and New England culture, 222-223; and American Revolution, 223 Shelter, 92-95 Shirley, William, 8-12, 168, 170; and patronage, 8, II; as military strategist, 8-9, 1 1 ; and General Court, 8- 1 1 ; and command, 9, n; and Pownall, 11-12; recall of, 12; and plans for 1756, 169; and Loudoun, 171-173, 175-177, 179-180; and Winslow, 171, 173; and provincial intentions, 172-173, 175, 176-177; as mediator, 179 Shrewsbury, Mass., 191, 192 Shute, Daniel, 88, 210; on deficiency of tents, 95 Siege: as typical battle, 142-143; of Ticonderoga (1759), 81, 142, 143; of Fort Beausejour (1755), 142, 144; of Ile-auxNoix (1760), 142, 143, 157; of Fort Oswego (1756), 142 Social history, vii Spain, 22 Springfield, Mass., 67, 68 Spruce beer, 129, 133 Stamp Act, 199 Standing armies, 124-125 Stillwater, N.Y., 86, 162, 163 Strategic situation: at end of 1755, 11; at end of 1758, 17-18; at beginning of 1760, 19

Sturbridge, Mass., 109 Subsidy. See Reimbursements, parliamentary, to Massachusetts Substitution. See Hiring of substitutes, provincial Suicide, 116 Supply system, provincial: and provisioning, 83; in crisis, 180; and Loudoun's proposal to reform, 181-182; and troop rebellions, 187 Supreme commander. See Commander in chief, British Sutlers, 88 Swearing, 117-118 Sweat, William, 69—70, 71; and personal hygiene, 97; on camp mortality, 104 Taunton, Mass., 211 Tents. See Shelter Teuset (Connecticut Indian provincial private), 131-132 Thwing, Benjamin, 43 Ticonderoga (Fort Carillon), 74, 75, 76, 114, 142, 143, 147, 160, 173, 191, 198, 204, 216; completed, 12; British defeated at, 16-17; seized by Amherst, 18. See also Battle of Ticonderoga; Siege: of Ticonderoga Towns of Massachusetts: economic organization of, 28-30; opportunity in, 30; and population growth of, 32—33; war's impact on, 58. See also Massachusetts Township Number 4, N.H., 18 Training, provincial, 75-77 Treatise of Military Discipline, A (Bland), 77 Treaty of Paris (1763), 22 Troop rebellions, provincial: and supply system, 187; causes of, 187-188; contractual motivation of, 188; resistance and response in, 189-194; list of, 251-253 Units, provincial — Arbuthnot, Capt. William: Company (Massachusetts, 1757), 186 — Atkins, Capt. Richard: Company (Massachusetts, 1756), 68n — Bacon, Capt. William: Company (Massachusetts, 1756), 43 — Bagley, Col. Jonathan: Company (Massachusetts, 1756), 43

Index 273 -Bagley, Col. Jonathan: Regiment (Massachusetts, 1758-1760), 73, 92, 112; poor training of, 76; mortality in, 100104; at battle of Ticonderoga, 147151; mutiny of, 189—191 — Burk, Capt. John: Company (Massachusetts, 1760), 207 —Doty, Col. Thomas: Regiment (Massachusetts, 1758), 88; desertion from, 112

— Frye, Col. Joseph: Regiment (Massachusetts, 1757), 187 — Gridley, Col. Richard: Regiment (Massachusetts, 1756), 50 — Hanners, Capt. George: Company (Massachusetts, 1756), 68n —House, Capt. James: Company (Massachusetts, 1756), 43 — Jenks, Capt. Samuel: Company (Massachusetts, 1760): mortality in, 100101; discipline in, 133-135 —Learned, Capt. Ebenezer: Company (Massachusetts, 1757-1758), 162-164 — Lyman, Col. Phineas: Regiment (Connecticut, 1757): poor training of, 76; mortality in, 100 —Nichols, Col. Ebenezer: Regiment (Massachusetts, 1758), 113; ineptitude of, 76; and skirmish at Halfway Brook, 146 —Nixon, Capt. John: Company (Massachusetts, 1756), 68n —Paige, Capt. William: Company (Massachusetts, 1760), 46—47 -Partridge, Lt. Col. Oliver: Light Infantry Battalion (Massachusetts, 1758), 50 — Peabody, Capt. William: Company (Massachusetts, 1756), 68 —Pearson, Capt. Jonathan: Company (Massachusetts, 1756), 43 — Preble, Col. Jedediah: Regiment (Massachusetts, 1758), 44; at battle of Ticonderoga, id— 11 —Robinson, Capt. Samuel: Company (Massachusetts, 1756), 43 —Rogers, Capt. Nathan: Company (Mass., 1759), 44 — Ruggles, Col. Timothy: Regiment (Massachusetts, 1756, 1758, 1760), 46-47, 100-101; field hospital of, 105;

riot in, 120; discipline in, 133-135; and exhortation of, 157; near-desertion in, 188-189 — Thomas, Col. John: Regiment (Massachusetts, 1760), 100 — Thwing, Capt. Benjamin: Company (Massachusetts, 1756), 43 — Wentworth, Capt. John: Company (Massachusetts, 1760): mortality in, IOO-IOI

—Willard, Col. Abijah: Regiment (Massachusetts, 1759, 1760), 47, 207; desertion from, 191-192 — Willard, Col. Samuel: Regiment (Massachusetts, 1755), 92 — Williams, Capt. Benjamin: Company (Massachusetts, 1756), 68n — Winslow, Lt. Col. John: Battalion (New England Regiment, 1755), 125 Units, regular — I7th Regiment of Foot, 127 —42nd Regiment of Foot: at battle of Ticonderoga, 143 — 46th Regiment of Foot, 40 n; at battle of Ticonderoga, 143 — 5Oth Regiment of Foot, 115 — 8oth Regiment of Foot (Gage's Light Infantry Regiment), 115, 127 — Rogers's Rangers, Maj. Robert, 201, 204, 205 Vaudreuil-Cavagnal, marquis de, 21 Venereal disease, 119 Walcott, Nathan, 70 Walpole, Mass., 43 Ware River Parish, Mass., 70, 71 War of Jenkins's Ear, 3, 8, 169 War of the Austrian Succession, 3, 8, 169 War of the League of Augsburg, 3, 26 War of the Spanish Succession, 3, 10 Webb, Daniel, 94, 168, 176, 177 Webster, Robert, on provision shortages, 83-84; on morale before battle, 144; and peer pressure, 1 60 Western counties (Hampshire, Worcester): as part of Massachusetts, 37; and provincial soldiers, 53, 54; and migration patterns, 54 Westfield, Mass., 71

274 Index Wheelock, Anthony, 67 n White, Samuel, 127 Whitehall, 175, 177 Whitemore, Edward, 190 Willard, Abijah, 47; on morale before battle, 144; and desertion, 191 Willard, Samuel, 92 Williams, Abraham, 70 Williams, Benjamin, 68 n Williams, Israel, 207-208 Williams, Joseph, 69, 97-98 Williams, William, 69 Winslow, Job, 44-45 Winslow, John: and Kennebec expedition, 9; in Nova Scotia campaign, 9; and Crown Point expedition (1756), 11-12, 169, 175; and rejoicing, 22; and descriptive lists, 48; and survey of Nova Scotia, 71; on sanitation, 97; and regular officers, 112-113; and provincial punishments, 125—127, 128; and capital punishment, 131; military background of, 169; and council of war, 170; and joint service with regulars, 170, 171-172, 173-174; and Loudoun's suspicions, 171; contractualism of, 172-173, 174; and logistical support from Loudoun, 180; and supply system, 181, 182-183

Wolfe, James, 65, 205; sent to America, 16; attacks French, 18-19; death of, 19; popularity of, in America, 23 Wood, Lemuel, 139-140 Wood Creek, 204, 205 Wooden horse, 124, 125—126. See also Punishments Woods, John: on guard duty, 80; and fatigue duties, 81—82; hut of, 93; and hygiene, 97; on deserters, 193 Woodstock, Conn., no, 186 Worcester, Mass., 70, 210; as rendezvous point, 67-68 Worcester County, Mass., 218 World War I, vii, 222 World War II, 24 Wrentham, Mass., 81, 109 York County, Mass. See Maine Youth: and town economies, 30, 32-39; and population, 32-33; and inheritance, 32-35; dependency of, and family welfare, 33-35; employment patterns of, 34, 36-37; and standing in farm towns, 3435; and age and economic status of, 35; and migration, 37-38; and warfare, 38-39